The Spychips Threat is a slight reworking of the earlier, Spychips. This version has several chapters aimed at religious Christians, likening plans for subcutaneous chips to the Number of the Beast. I've never been too interested in reading current events into biblical prophecy (for this Orthodox Jew, Revelations is of academic interest anyway), and the fact that an RFID company uses a black cat in its advertising, or that a machine-tool RFID system is called, "The Mark" isn't all that impressive to me. Still, the success of the Left Behind series suggests a strong market for this kind of thinking, and the authors don't overplay their hand here. People waiting to pounce on numerology equating Wal-Mart to 666 will be disappointed.
Some readers would stereotype the authors as part of the Religious Right, but their politics seem to run more along Libertarian lines, and the only public policy proposal from Albrecht's CASPIAN is right-to-know legislation.
The fact is, these are all planned uses for RFID. O'Reilly's RFID systems book is written by proponents of the technology, and it basically confirms both the plans and the privacy risks. The passive chips are virtually indestructable outside of a microwave, and anything that's deactivated can be re-activated.
One might reasonably argue that a citizens who let themselves be tagged and branded are already spending their off-hours at the Two Minutes' Hate, but that's only true if they know what's coming. And to that extent, The Spychips Threat is an important early-warning service. And if RFID system engineers are interested in privacy issues at all, it's almost certainly a result of these two authors.
Article comments