Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears [Telecom]

.........

Assuming you *know* where *all* the RFID chips are on your person, you might be able to shield them.

How do you know that the clothing you wear doesn't have an active chip still embedded in it?, or your shoes, or anything you just purchased at a shop, or your watch, or your mobile phone or or or or or .......

And the potential for someone to "bug" you for a nefarious purpose also raises its head.

A related article is here:

The related article claims the supplied sleeves can be compromised; seems to me an aluminum foil solution would be easy, inexpensive and effective -- no need to wear an aluminum foil hat and lead-lined underwear. :-)

IIRC, the under-the-skin RFID chip was pioneered 10+ years ago in San Mateo CA and mostly used for pets and recovery thereof. I write "mostly" because I seem to recall the technology is already being used for newborns in some countries.

Searching SFGate's articles finds these related article (e.g., chipping workers (yes, it's being done), etc.):

?f=/c/a/2007/08/12/EDG00REOHJ1.DTL but not the specific article I was seeking. Googling "RFID chips in babies" is an eye-opener, read while sitting down.

In "The President's Analyst", The Phone Company proposed to put the chip directly in the brain of the, er, telephone subscriber.

Maybe they already did, are your sure that Flu shot had nothing else it it?

Several years ago I bought a pair of shoes from K-Mart, every time I went in to to a Walmart the alarm would go off as I entered the store, finally a manager put my shoes through one of their scanners and sure enough my shoe had an anti-theft RFID Chip in it, he just scratched his head and deactivated it.

In "Enemy of the State", all of the protagonist's clothes and shoes and watch and pen were replaced with RFID chipped copies.

Heh - yeah. If they could get the passport RFID's they could read them on the credit cards too.

The "Presidents Analyst" was remarkably prescient. So was "The Prisoner."

***** Moderator's Note *****

Ah, but he never got to _really_ meet Number One, did he? Did that mean he could never know who his leaders were, or was it intended to portray the ambiguity of Number Six'es motivation in refusing to accept what he always was?

Bill

I had my Credit Union deactivate the chip in my card and opted out of another one. A few years ago Mobil Oil had chip key chains and one day I noticed credit card charges in a bunch of cities all over the country at the same time. When I found out what it was I smashed that key chain into a million little peaces and joined a suit against them, but that suit went nowhere.

Yes he did, when he was finally released, that series was used in a class I took in college.

I have always interpreted it as simply "We are our own worst enemy." It is very difficult to realize this, as it was for Number 6.

There are any number of ways to interpret that final episode, so there's no way you can be wrong. It helps to have drunk as much whiskey as McGoohan had in him when he wrote it.

***** Moderator's Note *****

The part I always loved was McGoohan's recounting of the submarine tryout: he had paid for a gen-u-ine submersible machine that would guard The Village's beaches. The thing sank straight to the bottom, leaving them with no way to portray the impossibility of escape by sea. According to McGoohan, while the crew was contemplating the deminse of the submersible, someone noticed a weather baloon in the distance, and McGoohan sent someone off to obtain some samples. The result was one of the most iconic "implacable enemy" images ever put on TV: one that Steven Spielberg paid homage to at the start of "Raiders Of The Lost Ark".

"Slippery slope" comes to mind, Bill. Also, we have already lost a lot of battles: it's the war that is still not quite decided.