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KATHERINE ALBRECHT
Interview conducted
in fall 2003 and January 2004,
by telephone.
Katherine Albrecht is the director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), an organization she founded in 1999 to advocate consumer-based solutions to the problem of retail privacy invasion. Katherine is widely credited with raising public awareness about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) through CASPIANâs âBoycott Benettonâ and âBoycott Gilletteâ campaigns, and through protest organizing, public appearances, and countless media interviews.
Albrecht is also widely recognized as one of the worldâs leading experts on consumer privacy. She has testified before the Federal Trade Commission, the California state legislature, the European Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank, in addition to giving over a thousand television, radio and print interviews. Her efforts have been featured on CNN, NPR, the CBS Evening News, Business Week, the London Times, and many more. Executive Technology Magazine recently called Katherine âperhaps the nationâs most outspoken privacy advocate,â and Wired magazine has called her the âErin Brockovichâ of RFID.
Albrecht holds an undergraduate degree in international marketing and a masterâs degree in instructional technology. She is currently completing her doctorate in education at Harvard University, where she is writing her dissertation on consumer psychology and privacy issues.
The international consortium that developed this technology wants to use these tiny chips to number and track every physical item on the entire planet. Obviously, this plan has profound implications for privacy.
The numbering system they want to put on these chips is called the EPC, which stands for electronic product code. Itâs related to the UPC, or Universal Product Code, currently used as the bar code. The chip itself will contain ninety-six bits, which will provide enough unique combinations to number every product produced on the planet for at least a thousand years. Depending on which mathematician you ask, this is enough numbers to uniquely identify every grain of rice or every speck of sand on the planet.
The stated purpose is to enable every item to be identified and tracked at any point along a supply chain. The system could be applied to almost any physical itemâfrom ballpoint pens to toothpaste to anything else. Each item would carry its own unique information coded into an embedded chip.
The technology already exists to make this a reality. Creating this global system is described by its backers as âa political rather than a technological problem.â Supporters are aiming for worldwide acceptance of the technologies needed to build the infrastructure within the next few years.
This technology is slated to replace the bar code, so we should talk a little more about that. There are three fundamental ways RFID is different from a bar code. As I said, unlike a bar code, where the UPC numbers on your can of Coke would match the numbers on my can of Coke, each can of Coke rolling off the assembly line will be issued its own unique identifying number. The concern here is that when you pay for that can of Coke, its unique ID number will be linked up with your name in the storeâs database. This is already happening today. Any time you pay with a credit card, ATM card or check, the store records who you are and every item you bought, and that information gets consolidated into giant multi-store databases. Now imagine that instead of recording that you bought Coke, like they do today, the store records which exact, specific cans of Coke you bought. Store databases will become giant registration systems that can cross reference the owner of any physical item purchased on the planet. Everything you own could be linked specifically to you in a database.
If you take that to the next step it means that any item in the world can be picked up and scanned and its owner identified. So if a can of Coke falls off the garbage truck on the way to the dump and someone picks it up, they could scan it and you could get an automatic littering ticket in the mail. Or someone could steal the can of Coke and plant it at a crime scene and you could get a knock on your door asking what you were doing last night. It means that when you give someone a gift, the ownership trail could be tracked. If youâre wearing a watch given to you by your ex-girlfriend, as you walk through a doorway you could be identified through things you bought and her connection with you could also be inferred based on your carrying something registered to her.
The second way RFID tags are different from bar codes is that they can be read from a distance, right through the things we normally rely on to protect our privacy, like a backpack, or a shopping bag, or a suitcase. Radio waves travel through virtually any material but metal or water. This sets on its head a basic, fundamental, common sense, human body notion of what creates privacyâthat if you canât see it, you donât know about it. If I have something privateâa book I donât want you to know Iâm reading, a package of condoms, a spare pair of underwear, or anything else I donât want to advertise to the worldâI can put it in my purse or my pocket. And people wonât know whatâs in there. RFID changes that, because in essence it creates a form of X-ray vision so that anyone with access to the technology can know what Iâm trying to hide. Thatâs so counterintuitive that people sometimes have a difficult time understanding it could be done to them.
It also entirely throws out the notion of consent. These things can be read at a distance, through fabric, without your knowledge or permission. Itâs possible that every doorway you walk through could be equipped with a reader device that would take a full inventory of everything youâre wearing and carrying. And you would never know it was happening. It is possible that every park bench you sat onâtheyâve actually talked about embedding these in furnitureâwould be able to identify you and what is in your lunch bag.
At this point people always ask, who would want to do this and why? The researchers at MIT who developed this technology were working for a consortium of multinational corporations and government agencies that funded them. It took them three years and millions of dollars. And of course now that RFID exists, uses quickly start springing into peopleâs minds. Look at who is interested in these technologies. Does the Defense Department have your best interests at heart? How about Wal-Mart?
Thereâs a third way RFID is unlike bar codes. To the best of my knowledge thereâs no serious health impact from exposure to bar code readers and laser scanners unless you stare at the laser. But there may be quite worrisome health problems associated with being continually bombarded by RFID electromagnetic energy from the reader devices. Even today if you go into certain Target stores to buy DVDs with RFID tags attached you could be standing next to a shelf thatâs bombarding you with electromagnetic energy.
The proponents of this technology say there are no health risks, that itâs no more dangerous than being near an FM radio. Well, theyâre being disingenuous there, too, because their internal documents reveal that they contacted scientists and government committees from countries all over the world to ask for their latest research, opinions, and laws on electromagnetic energy. What emerges is a widely diverging set of opinions over whether or not this technology is safe. The basic conclusion of the Auto-ID center scientists was, âWe donât know, and maybe we should do a little more research.â Thatâs great. I think they should do a little more research. But thatâs not the standard industry line, and in the meantime theyâre proceeding full-steam ahead. Even with their self-confessed need for more research, they want to put these things literally everywhere. What effects will this have on pregnant women and growing children and the elderly? What about the rest of us? Do we want to be constantly probed by electromagnetic waves looking for anything that could provide them with information about us? Itâs not only creepy, itâs quite possibly dangerous.
In 2001 this gang wired the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to see if they could track objects tagged with RFID. Gillette, Wal-Mart, and Tesco have installed shelves that can read RFID tags embedded in razor packages. The shelves take shoppersâ photographs when they pick the items up off the shelf. The European Central Bank and the government of Japan are both working on plans to imbed bank notesâcashâwith RFID tags to make it as traceable as credit cards, and no longer anonymous. Hitachi Europe has already developed a chip small enough, at 0.3 mm square and thin as a human hair, to fit inside a banknote. Mass production of these chips has already begun.
Itâs an important phenomenon. I remember a few years back seeing a photograph of a perfectly formed human ear growing out of the back of a living mouse. I was so horrified that the room spun. I immediately called a friend of mine saying we had to do something about it. How could we allow scientists to create such monstrosities? When I reached him, my friend said, âI canât believe you are just now seeing that photo. Itâs been around for ages. Where have you been?â Amazingly, that response shut me right up; all my fury fizzled on the spot. Instead of feeling angry, I felt stupidâstupid, then crushingly defeated. Why? How does our society get us to replace acute, healthy outrage with a chronic, thereâs-nothing-we-can-do-about-it, soul-killing ache?
My experience watching the RFID industry has clued me in to part of the answer. The technologistsâ dirty trick is to convince us that we can only fight things that are new. If something has been around for a while, the implication is that other people have already accepted it (or so they want you to think). At that point, anyone opposing a particular development can be dismissed for being âbehind the timesâ (though thatâs rarely the case), or for arguing about something thatâs already been settled in the court of public opinion (though it rarely has been).
This is dangerous because it means that industry can quietly slip something into the world and not mention it for a year or so, outside of a few esoteric industry publications. When regular people eventually find out about it, their outrage is siphoned away as industry reps stifle a yawn and say, âOh, please, that old technology? It has been around for ages. Where have you been?â Then suddenly youâre the one on the defensive.
This has not been the case with opposition to RFID. We found out about it in the earliest planning stages a few years back, when I attended meetings at the Auto-ID Center and heard firsthand, behind closed doors, what they were developing. It must have been frustrating to the RFID folks that the standard âoh, please, letâs not rehash that old thingâ line wouldnât work in this situation, which is why I think they later tried to paint it as having been around for sixty years.
When that didnât work, they reversed tactics and started saying that opposition to RFID is premature since the technology is too new to judge. Itâs hilarious. When you respond early youâre âjumping the gun,â but if you wait even a fraction of a second after that, youâre âbeating a dead horse.â Theyâve rigged the game so there is never a good time to criticize technology.
And in the case of RFID, itâs nuts to say it dates back to World War II in any meaningful sense. The first commercial application of the kind of small, efficient, passive EPC tags weâre talking about now came in November, 2002, when Gillette announced it was going to buy 500 million of them from a company calledâand Iâm not making this upâAlien Technology.
The chip contains data, but in order to communicate the data at a distance it has to be hooked up to an antenna. The antenna is typically made of a flat strip of metal (although theyâre experimenting with various other materials). Itâs designed to pick up and amplify any ambient electromagnetic energy beamed at it by an RFID reader. The readers emit a continual stream of energy on the chance that an RFID tag might be within range. If the reader pings an RFID tag, the tagâs antenna picks up the energy and stimulates the chip to beam its data back to the reader device. Thatâs how it all works. And thatâs where their âpervasive global network of reader devicesâ comes in. A reader device can be placed almost anywhere. They can be installed in doorways, woven into carpet, an...
