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Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage. Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

MIAMI — Travelers crossing U.S. land and sea borders can now replace their passport book with a new passport card. Federal passport officials started issuing the wallet-size cards on July 14. More than 450,000 people have applied for the card, said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, at a news conference Monday at the Port of Miami. "The U.S. passport card is a less expensive and more affordable alternative to the U.S. passport book," Sprague said. The brand new document — which looks similar to a drivers license — can be used for people returning to...

Dutch researchers will be able to publish their controversial report on the Mifare Classic (Oyster) RFID chip in October, a Dutch judge ruled today. Researchers from Radboud University in Nijmegen revealed two weeks ago they had cracked and cloned London's Oyster travelcard and the Dutch public transportation travelcard, which is based on the same RFID chip. Attackers can scan a card reading unit, collect the cryptographic key that protects security and upload it to a laptop. Details are then transferred to a blank card, which can be used for free travel. Around one billion of these cards have been sold...

This article was written for Danwei by Chinapat The Olympics in Beijing has become a platform for rapid technology development and deployment in China. One of the new technologies becoming more commonplace is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). Beijing has been using RFID subway passes for a while, and nothing but the best for the 2008 Games means RFID tags in the tickets. A source at BOCOG has offered more details about the RFID-enabled tickets being issued for the Beijing Olympics this summer: All tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies will include RFID tags containing personal information about the ticket...

Radio frequency identification tags used by hospitals and health care providers can cause vital lifesaving equipment and machines to malfunction, according to a study published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the AP/Houston Chronicle reports. The tags use wireless technology and often are embedded in medical devices, such as syringe staplers and blood bags, to prevent thefts and losses, as well as to prevent medical errors during surgeries. RFID also is used in drug containers to prevent tampering (Tanner, AP/Houston Chronicle, 6/24). For the study, researchers in the Netherlands conducted 123 tests to determine the effects...

(NaturalNews) A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.

WASHINGTON -- In the quest to increase Americans' access to broadband Internet, federal regulators are considering a new plan: get someone to give it away free. The Federal Communications Commission is considering a plan that would require the winner of a planned airwaves auction to offer free wireless-Internet service to most Americans within the next few years.

The State Department will soon begin production of an electronic passport card that security specialists and members of Congress fear will be vulnerable to alteration or counterfeiting. The agency has contracted with L-1 Identity Solutions Inc. to produce electronic-passport cards as a substitute for booklet passports for use by Americans who travel frequently by road or sea to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. About the size of a credit card, the electronic-passport card displays a photo of the user and a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip containing data about the user. The State Department announced recently that it will begin...

Every single Metropolitan police officer will be 'microchipped' so top brass can monitor their movements on a Big Brother style tracking scheme, it can be revealed today. According to respected industry magazine Police Review, the plan - which affects all 31,000 serving officers in the Met, including Sir Ian Blair - is set to replace the unreliable Airwave radio system currently used to help monitor officer's movements. The new electronic tracking device - called the Automated Personal Location System (APLS) - means that officers will never be out of range of supervising officers. But many serving officers fear being turned...

New technologies always come with privacy issues There is no shortage of articles discussing privacy issues introduced by new technologies. ReadID, passports, chips in currency bills, and other engineering marvels designed for purposes of tracking and monitoring, always come with a bouquet of questions and privacy concerns. On the other hand, technologies not specifically designed for monitoring can sometimes be used for this very purpose and privacy problems introduced by them are often overlooked. Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) is one of those technologies. What is TPMS? TPMS lets on-board vehicle computers measure air pressure in the tires. If you...

WASHINGTON--In the long-running Real ID staring match, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ended up being the first to blink. Homeland Security announced Wednesday that all 50 states and the District of Columbia will be technically Real ID-compliant by the May 11, 2008 deadline--even though many states actually have rejected the concept and have zero plans to embrace a national ID card. This means Americans will face no new hassles when using their licenses to enter federal buildings or fly on airplanes starting on May 11. That's a good thing. But the way this turned out is so odd it's...

You might not know it, but as of January it became illegal in California for companies to require workers to have devices implanted under their skin that would reveal their whereabouts at all times. State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) called his legislation a safeguard against "the ultimate invasion of privacy." Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law in October. But your privacy may not be completely safe. The same chip-based technology that California won't allow to be forcibly placed under people's skin will soon be ubiquitous in cellphones, which the telecom industry believes will be increasingly used as...

Nox Defense creates chips (and even RFID Dust) for tracking property and people An employee looking to steal confidential information from his employer sneaks into what should be a secure back room after hours. He pulls charts and files from a top-level financial meeting and slides them into his briefcase before heading back out. What the insider doesn't know is that his shoes picked up hundreds of tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that had been scattered across the floor. As he passes by an RFID reader near the front door of his office building, security will be alerted that...

Hacker gives live video demonstrationFollowing on from last week’s story about how the MIFARE Classic’s RFID chip, as used in London Transport’s Oyster card, had been compromised, BoingBoing has gone a step further. It gave a video demonstration of a hacker demonstrating how easy it is to extract details from a RFID-equipped credit card. In the video, the hacker Pablos Holman boasts that he is able to “decrypt the data” using an “eight dollar reader from eBay”. One quick swipe of the reporter’s American Express card later and he appears to have done just that, with the cardholder’s name and...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MrVup9Dl4U For over twenty years, "Patriot Pastor" Garrett Lear has strode the halls of New Hampshire's legislature...serving as a voice for his faith and his Revolutionary War ancestors. Today he talks with us about Real ID, the liberty deficit among Christians and his colorful outfit. Pastor Lear's church is in Wakefield, New Hampshire. What do *you* think? Is Real ID the Mark of the Beast? A precursor to it? A bad thing? A good thing?

PARIS: Thousands of garments in the sprawling men's department at the Galeria Kaufhof are equipped with tiny wireless chips that can forestall fashion disaster by relaying information from the garment to a dressing-room screen. The garments in the department store, in Essen, Germany, contain radio frequency identification chips, small circuits that communicate by radio waves through portable readers and more than 200 antennas that can not only recommend a brown belt for those tweed slacks but also track garments from the racks, shelves and dressing rooms on the store's third floor. This pioneering pilot project of the Metro Group, a...

China investigates exporter of 'contaminated eel' (Xinhua) Updated: 2008-02-22 14:41 BEIJING -- China and the Republic of Korea are to jointly investigate how Chinese frozen eel exports came to contain carcinogenic malachite green, a fungicide banned in food production in China, according to a statement from China's quality watchdog on Friday. Chinese investigators had found no information about the producer, identified by the Republic of Korea media as Jiangxi Yichun Eel Industry Development Co. Ltd, said the statement from the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (GAQSIQ). The producer had not registered with China's import and export inspection...

The tattoo display: "Waterproof and powered by pizza." Jim Mielke's wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin. The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and...

BREAKING NEWS updated 9 minutes ago LOS ANGELES - The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday recalled 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a Southern California slaughterhouse that is being investigated for mistreating cattle. Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. The federal agency said the recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which supplies meat to the federal school lunch program and to some major fast-food chains.This breaking news story will be...

Now here is a Patriot Act everyone can get behind. It's called the Patriot Corporation of America Act and it rewards the companies that don't screw their employees and weaken the country by moving the jobs to China and elsewhere. In these troubled times, doesn't that sound like common sense? Government policy presently works in opposite ways. It literally assists and subsidizes the disloyal free riders who boost their profits by dumping their obligations to the home country. It's called globalization. Establishment wisdom says there is nothing politicians can do about it. But the bills introduced Thursday by three senators...

Technology already exists that could lead to the tracking of purchases and people. Critics fear a loss of privacy. Here's a vision of the not-so-distant future: • Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items — and, by extension, consumers — wherever they go, from a distance. • A seamless, global network of electronic "sniffers" will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, "live spam," may be beamed at them. • In "Smart Homes,"...

What sort of trouble does this technology enable? Technology can be a Good Thing but that doesn't mean we should fall over the bar-stool implementing new technology -- "just because it's there" We need to ask the question: What sort of trouble does this new technology enable?" before we proceed.

No one can accuse the fine public servants of California’s Department of Food and Agriculture of sitting on their hands, and letting raw milk coliforms threaten the health and safety of California consumers. No, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. The junior he-men, working on behalf of the senior he-man-terminator, are out there…fighting the common enemy, raw milk coliforms.

... _Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items _ and, by extension, consumers _ wherever they go, from a distance. _A seamless, global network of electronic "sniffers" will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, "live spam," may be beamed at them. _In "Smart Homes," sensors built into walls, floors and appliances will inventory possessions, record eating habits, monitor medicine cabinets _ all the while, silently reporting data to marketers eager for a...

The process developed by Somark involves a geometric array of micro-needles and an ink capsule, which is used to 'tattoo' an animal. The ink can be detected from 4 feet away. A startup company developing chipless RFID ink has tested its product on cattle and laboratory rats. Somark Innovations announced this week that it successfully tested biocompatible RFID ink, which can be read through animal hairs. The passive RFID technology could be used to identify and track cows to reduce financial losses from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease) scares. Somark, which formed in 2005, is located at the Center...

Over half the birthing facilities in Ohio are being equipped with an RFID infant protection system placed on infants at birth to prevent them from being abducted from the hospital or from being given to the wrong mother.  "Standard protocol in the hospitals using the VeriChip system is that the baby receives an RFID anklet at birth and the mother receives a matching wristband," VeriChip spokeswoman Allison Tomek told WND. "The mothers are not asked." VeriChip Corp., a publicly listed company headquartered in Delray Beach, Fla., is marketing though its wholly-owned subsidiary, Xmark, a HUGS brand tag-and-bracelet infant security system....

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico is going high tech to better track the movements of Central Americans who regularly cross the southern border to work or visit. Starting in March, the National Immigration Institute will distribute cards containing electronic chips. Those items will record every arrival and departure of so-called temporary workers and visitors, mostly from Guatemala. The cards will replace a non-electronic pass formerly given to area residents. Officials say the purpose is to guarantee security for workers and visitors. Statistics from the institute show that more than 182,000 undocumented migrants were detained in Mexico in 2006. Most were...

AUSTRALIAN scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say. Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas. -snip- Even farmers who laugh at the idea of environmentally friendly kangaroo farts say that's nothing to joke about, particularly given the devastating drought Australia is suffering. -snip-

Radio transmitters to track merchandise are one thing, but are people ready for ID imbedded in their bodies? It is the technology that is everywhere and no place. It is invisibly inserted into the perky keyless remote that unlocks your car. It opens the garage door. It is wedged in the pass cards that let employees into office buildings. Subtle and controversial, the radio frequency identification device, or RFID, makes our lives more convenient in myriad small ways. But on a larger scale, critics warn that these dime-sized radio transmitters will one day become digital tattle-tales, a tool of what...

A dog has been reunited with its owner after seven years. Lyn O'Byrne, from Brighouse, West Yorks, had her Lurcher, Rhia, stolen from the veterinary practice where she worked in Kent in January 2001. Last week she received a call from the Lost Dogs and Cats Line at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home to say they had a dog registered to her address. Ms O'Bryne was traced through a microchip inserted into the scruff of the dog's neck containing her details. 'Happy ending' She said: "When I received the call I didn't twig why The Lost Dogs & Cats Line...

Police are hunting a cat-napper who has taunted owners with a letter claiming their pets have been "relocated." In the letter the abductor says their pets have been dumped at least 25 miles away as punishment for "invading" his garden. So far seven cats have vanished from the same road in Southampton, Hants. The author taunted owners saying: "They have not been harmed, just re-located. You have virtually no chance of getting them back. "If you were lucky enough to get your cat back... the second time they get caught in my garden, they will be destroyed." Shocked residents, who...

It would be an interesting feature of an employee’s first day: sign a contract, fill out a W-2 and roll up your sleeve for your microchip injection. Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under their skin.

WASHINGTON--Embedding electronic tags in containers of food and supplies--and even in workers' identification documents--will "revolutionize" the way the United Nations doles out relief in the aftermath of the next tsunami, civil war or disease outbreak, a senior organization official said Wednesday. When U.N. workers descend on distressed locales, they often encounter logjams at airport tarmacs and confusion over what exactly is in this or that box, said David Nabarro, who's chiefly in charge of coordinating responses to bird and human influenza for the U.N. Development Group. Nabarro said he envisions his organization one day going the way of the military...

The Michigan Department of Agriculture at long last force-tested and tagged Greg Niewendorp’s twenty head of cattle today. About twenty supporters and six media representatives were in attendance, Charlevoix County Sheriff George Lasater told me late this afternoon.

NEW YORK - A federal judge refused Friday to block a new city rule that requires taxi drivers to install global positioning systems and credit card machines in their cabs by Monday. The drivers argue that the city overstepped its authority and acted unconstitutionally when it mandated the units. Their lawsuit also claims GPS will give away trade secrets by disclosing the cabbies' driving patterns, which they say give them a competitive edge. U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman refused to block the rule from taking effect, saying the use of the technology to improve taxi service appeared to outweigh...

Democrat and Republican liberals on the US House Education and Labor Committee have released their discussion draft for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  Both Hillary Clinton, as the "mayor" of the government "village" which wants to raise our children, and the ghost of George Orwell, author of 1984, are well represented in this draft.  What began in 1965, ostensibly as an effort to help poor children improve academic achievement has grown and spread like a monstrous cancer that is destroying academic achievement and freedom, parental autonomy, privacy, and the ability to maintain our republic for ALL public...

Zeke lived with an FFA teacher because he had no other home. He worked for his room and board; he fed the pigs and chickens, and helped with the milking. The summer between the 8th and 9th grades, Jasper, the FFA teacher, took Zeke to a neighbor's ranch and let him pick out a day-old Hereford bull for his first FFA project. The deal was that Jasper would pay for the calf, and for the feed, and Zeke could repay Jasper when the calf grew to become the Grand Champion Steer at the state fair, and sold at the fair's...

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found "reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top "innovative technologies." But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. "The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a...

North America's SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc., or NASCO, has figured out a way to cash in on the Chinese containers passing along the NAFTA Superhighway from the Mexican ports of Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas to U.S. and Canadian destinations. WND has obtained a copy of a draft preliminary joint venture contract between Savi Networks and NASCO, specifying that NASCO will get paid 25 cents for each "revenue-generating intermodal ocean cargo container" that is registered by the RFID sensors the Communist Chinese are now installing along Interstate 35.

Radio sensing stations to track traffic and cargo up and down the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway corridor are being installed by Communist China, operating through a port operator subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa, in conjunction with Lockheed Martin and the North America's SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc. The idea is that RFID chips placed in containers where manufactured goods are shipped from China will be able to be tracked to the Mexican ports on the Pacific where the containers are unloaded onto Mexican trucks and trains for transportation on the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway to destinations within the United States. NASCO, a trade association based...

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity. Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens. Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background,...

Sneaking onto the beach and annoying beach tag checkers could be a thing of the past in Ocean City, where a city-wide wireless network is planned to go into effect next summer. Even if they're vacationing on the shores of Ocean City, people want internet access. For residents it would be free, for vistiors...6 dollars a day. But logging onto the internet is just the tip of the iceberg. Ocean City Administrator Jim Rutella says the possibilities are endless. Garbage cans could send massages that they're full, and beach tags could be equipped with R-F-I-D technology. That way checkers can...

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms. ADVERTISEMENT The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs — radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick — was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said. "To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief...

(AP) CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms. The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs — radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick — was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said. "To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief...

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms. The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs — radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick — was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said. "To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief executive...

The American Medical Association (AMA) has officially established a code of ethics designed to protect patients receiving RFID implants. The recommendations focus on safeguarding a patient's privacy and health, and are the result of an evaluation by the AMA's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) regarding the medical and ethical implications of RFID chips in humans, as well as a follow-up report recently released. The latter discusses the possible advantages and specific privacy and ethical issues of using RFID-enabled implantations for clinical purposes. Entitled "Radio Frequency ID Devices in Humans," the report is presented by Robert M. Sade, M.D.,...

We've learned about "profiling" from watching crime dramas on television. Profiling is the collecting and recording of a person's behavior, and then analyzing psychological characteristics to predict or assess reactivity in certain situations. Profiling is also used to identify a particular group or kind of people, like consumers. It determines personality types and future behaviors. Law enforcement profilers identify how and when a felon is likely to commit his next crime. In newspapers and magazines, reporters perform background profiles as a part of feature stories by detailing a person's history and notable behaviors. In the corporate world, profiling has become...

Welcome to Xmark, the new corporate identity for our healthcare security products. Our new name emphasizes our focus on healthcare security. You may have known us under the eXI or VeriChip brand, but we are now bringing all our products under the Xmark name.

Doctors could soon be storing essential medical information under the skin of their patients, the American Medical Association says. Devices the size of a grain of rice that are implanted with a needle could give emergency room doctors quick access to the records of chronically ill patients, the nation's largest doctors group said in a report. The association adopted a policy Monday stating that the devices can improve the "safety and efficiency of patient care" by helping to identify patients and enabling secure access to clinical information. These radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) are already used by Wal-Mart and other...

For more than 20 years, illegal aliens have crossed the U.S. border by the millions and have successfully avoided thousands of law enforcement officials whose job it is to capture and remove them from the United States. Government has utterly failed to locate, capture or remove the illegals. Despite this spectacular failure – the inability to find 20 million illegal aliens – this same government is preparing to locate, monitor and control the movement of hundreds of millions of livestock animals. Every cow – as many as 100 million – must have a unique numbered identification tag, most likely a...