Derrick Jensen Resistance Against Empire (2010)

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.Albrecht is also widely recognized as one of theworld s leading experts on consumer privacy.Shehas testified before the Federal Trade Commission,the California state legislature, the EuropeanCommission, and the Federal Reserve Bank, inaddition to giving over a thousand television, radioand print interviews.Her efforts have been featuredon CNN, NPR, the CBS Evening News , BusinessWeek , the London Times , and many more.Executive Technology Magazine recently calledKatherine perhaps the nation s most outspokenprivacy advocate, and Wired magazine has calledher the Erin Brockovich of RFID.Albrecht holds an undergraduate degree ininternational marketing and a master s degree ininstructional technology.She is currently completingher doctorate in education at Harvard University,where she is writing her dissertation on consumerpsychology and privacy issues.Derrick Jensen: What is RFID?Katherine Albrecht : RFID stands for RadioFrequency Identification ( RF for Radio Frequencyand ID for Identification, as in ID card ).RFID is anew consumer goods tracking system that consistsof tiny computer chips the size in some cases of aspeck of dust hooked up to miniature antennasthat can transmit information remotely.Industrywants to call them Smart Tags or improved barcodes. We call them Spy Chips.The international consortium that developed thistechnology wants to use these tiny chips to numberand track every physical item on the entire planet.Obviously, this plan has profound implications forprivacy.DJ: How do these chips work?KA: The typical RFID tag gets its power from energysent to it through the air by reader devices in theenvironment.By itself, a passive RFID tag doesn treally do anything until it is contacted by a readerdevice that beams out electromagnetic energy (whatyou and I would call radio waves ).The energy ispicked up by the tag s antenna and transmitted tothe chip, which then beams back its uniqueidentifying number.It says, Here I am.I am chipnumber 304862, and so on.The numbering system they want to put on thesechips is called the EPC, which stands for electronicproduct code.It s related to the UPC, or UniversalProduct Code, currently used as the bar code.Thechip itself will contain ninety-six bits, which willprovide enough unique combinations to numberevery product produced on the planet for at least athousand years.Depending on which mathematicianyou ask, this is enough numbers to uniquely identifyevery grain of rice or every speck of sand on theplanet.The stated purpose is to enable every item to beidentified and tracked at any point along a supplychain.The system could be applied to almost anyphysical item from ballpoint pens to toothpaste toanything else.Each item would carry its own uniqueinformation coded into an embedded chip.DJ: You re not talking about every can of Cokehaving the same identifying Universal Product Code,right?KA: No, this is different.Today all cans of Cokehave the same bar code number.But with RFID,every can of Coke would have its own unique,trackable code, different from every other can ofCoke.So would every sweater, every pair of shoes,every tire, every dollar bill.Which means thatanywhere there are reader devices, the item.DJ:.and by extension anyone wearing orcarrying it.KA:.can be tracked.Right.And the plans forreader devices are pretty far-reaching.Proponentsenvision, in their words, a pervasive global networkof millions of receivers along the entire supplychain in airports, seaports, highways, distributioncenters, warehouses, retail stores, and in the home.This would allow for seamless, continuousidentification and tracking of physical items as theymove from one place to another, enablingcompanies to determine the whereabouts of all theirproducts at all times.An executive at InternationalPaper put it bluntly, We ll put a radio frequency IDtag on everything that moves in the North Americansupply chain. The ultimate goal is for RFID tocreate, as those behind it say, a physically linkedworld in which every item on the planet isnumbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked.The technology already exists to make this a reality.Creating this global system is described by itsbackers as a political rather than a technologicalproblem. Supporters are aiming for worldwideacceptance of the technologies needed to build theinfrastructure within the next few years.This technology is slated to replace the bar code, sowe should talk a little more about that.There arethree fundamental ways RFID is different from a barcode.As I said, unlike a bar code, where the UPCnumbers on your can of Coke would match thenumbers on my can of Coke, each can of Cokerolling off the assembly line will be issued its ownunique identifying number.The concern here is thatwhen you pay for that can of Coke, its unique IDnumber will be linked up with your name in thestore s database.This is already happening today.Any time you pay with a credit card, ATM card orcheck, the store records who you are and every itemyou bought, and that information gets consolidatedinto giant multi-store databases.Now imagine thatinstead of recording that you bought Coke, like theydo today, the store records which exact, specificcans of Coke you bought.Store databases willbecome giant registration systems that can crossreference the owner of any physical item purchasedon the planet.Everything you own could be linkedspecifically to you in a database.If you take that to the next step it means that anyitem in the world can be picked up and scanned andits owner identified.So if a can of Coke falls off thegarbage truck on the way to the dump and someonepicks it up, they could scan it and you could get anautomatic littering ticket in the mail.Or someonecould steal the can of Coke and plant it at a crimescene and you could get a knock on your doorasking what you were doing last night.It means thatwhen you give someone a gift, the ownership trailcould be tracked.If you re wearing a watch given toyou by your ex-girlfriend, as you walk through adoorway you could be identified through things youbought and her connection with you could also beinferred based on your carrying somethingregistered to her.DJ: So if I had any purchased consumer item onme, if I wore clothes that were manufactured, I couldbe tracked at every moment?KA: Right.You could be tracked by the things youcarry [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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