Brownwood RFID & Republicans: Who's driving the RFID Train ?

Through the rest of the year, livestock identification in Texas is moving from the drawing board to field conditions to test identification devices, equipment durability and reliability. Using USDA cooperative agreement funding, the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) has awarded contracts to four manufacturers of radio frequency ear tags (RFID), five makers of tag “reader” devices, four computer software providers and a data trustee to maintain the computer records.
Tag readers and computers are set up in several livestock markets, and customers of these facilities will be issued RFID ear tags for cattle that will be marketed through the livestock markets. Two cattle firms that purchase from the three markets also will be equipped to record and report movement information as cattle are sorted and shipped to feedlots in the Texas Panhandle.
About 80,000 of the radio frequency ear tags, known as RFID tags, are being provided by Allflex USA; Farnam, Temple Tag Company and Y-Tex. The tags, to be placed on cattle, sheep and domestic deer, emit a low-frequency signal that is picked up and “read” by a device as small as a handheld wand, or as large as a gate, panel or chute. Tag readers, supplied by AgInfoLink, Allflex USA, Farnam, Temple Tag Company and Y-Tex, will be tested for speed and durability in “real-life” conditions.
Computer software is needed for managing the ear tag information and movement records, services being provided by eMerge Interactive, Micro Beef Technologies, Texas Dairy Herd Improvement Association 032, and the Beef Information Exchange (BIE)/AgInfoLink. The data “trus-tee,” or company that will hold all the records is the Beef Information Exchange, and this service will be evaluated with an exercise to trace animal movement. The results of the field tests will be reported back to the committees working on the National Animal Identification System, so the glitches with computers, ear tags or readers can be fixed before they are put in use across the country.
Registering for a premises identification number is easy. To obtain a paper copy or schedule a presentation, call the TAHC at 1-800-550-8242. The TAHC’s home page at http://www.tahc.state.tx.us has a link to the premises identification application.
source: http://www.txfb.org/NewsManager/anmviewer.asp?a=585&print=yes
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Note from Steve: This discussion is going on over the airwaves of KXYL (Brownwood Talk Radio) and to this point, the callers are overwhelmingly against this program. Who in Brownwood supports this program ? Does the Texas Farm Bureau ? Do Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry ( Did he sign the Bill of approval ? ) and the other Gubanatorial Candidates approve ? Do you trust that "Checks and Balances" are in place to prevent abuse ? Were they in the Enron, AIG and Abramoff Scandals ?
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Rep. Senators Vow to Protect RFID

A task force composed of Republican U.S. Senators announced it would work to ensure that RFID technology is not burdened with premature regulations.

By Jonathan Collins

Mar. 10, 2005—A group of Republican U.S. Senators said they will work to ensure that RFID deployments stay free of regulation, according to a new policy platform that has already won the support of RFID, technology and retail organizations while drawing concern from privacy groups.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force unveiled a list of 40 policy proposals, with RFID winning a special mention in the category dealing with the group's plans for protecting privacy and e-commerce.
Sen. John Ensign
The announcement said that the Republican Senators would "protect exciting new technologies from premature regulation or legislation in search of a problem. RFID holds tremendous promise for our economy, including military logistics and commercial inventory efficiencies, and should not be saddled prematurely with regulation."
Privacy group CASPIAN reacted to the agenda by saying it was telling that the task force decided to highlight RFID as a privacy issue and not as an issue of "eliminating barriers to innovation" or "promoting education and technology"—two other categories covered in the policy proposal. CASPIAN believes the group's agenda shows a positive bias toward RFID while ignoring problems already raised regarding its implementation and consumer privacy.
"This is a very pro-industry statement, and it does raise a little concern," says Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of CASPIAN. "If all it said was, 'RFID should not be burdened with regulations prematurely,' that would be fine, but 'exciting new technologies' is a pretty loaded term."
The 14-member task force says it acts as a conduit for the technology industry on Capitol Hill, and its platform promotes a wide array of goals, including support for efforts to improve the federal government's IT systems and a permanent end to taxes on Internet access. Republicans currently hold majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the task force says it plans to push through Congress the agenda outlined in its platform.

to read the entire article please visit http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/1440/1/1/
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You’ve been chipped: Microchips tag people under the skin

By Theresa Bradley
It took the young emergency room doctor three days to identify the unconscious El Salvadoran man wheeled into a Los Angeles hospital with his head bashed in.
Tracing trails of receipts, clothes tags and phone numbers, Dr. John Halamka got good at tracking down the names and medical histories of “John” and “Jane Doe” patients. “Arthur Conan Doyle would’ve been proud,” he recalled.
But Halamka also daydreamed of ways to make the sleuthing unnecessary, saving time and lives. When he heard of VeriChip, a computer-linked ID tag that can be implanted in the human body, he decided to test one out himself.
On his lunch break one day last December, a colleague at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Halamka is now chief information officer, injected the tiny microchip under the skin of his right upper arm.
Halamka had been “chipped,” joining some 1,000 people implanted with the device worldwide, the chipmaker says. Implants are intended to track easily disoriented Alzheimer’s patients, give the chronically ill quick access to complex medical records and restrict entry to high-security areas.
Because it's imbedded in the flesh, the tag can't be stolen or lost. "It is always there when needed," chip designer Dr. Richard Seelig told a federal panel last January.
VeriChip is the first tag of its kind patented and marketed for use in humans. More than 8,000 have been sold to distributors since 2002, according to Florida-based Applied Digital, the parent company of VeriChip.
Doctors certified by the company purchase, resell and administer the microchips, which are the size of a grain of rice. The procedure involves a quick syringe injection and costs about $200.
The radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology that VeriChip employs has already revolutionized manufacturing, retail and security businesses.
The microchips act as wireless barcodes, receiving and transmitting data via radio waves, tracking goods from assembly line to store shelf, verifying passports and security codes, and tracing the movements of livestock and pets.
Now the chips are being used to tag humans.
To date, most of VeriChip’s customers are outside the United States, particularly from Latin America, where the chip’s tracking potential could deter kidnappings. Officials in the Mexican attorney general’s office have been implanted with the device to access high-security areas. Meanwhile, chipped VIPs at a Barcelona nightclub can pay for drinks by waving their hands under a scanner that directly bills a house account.
In the United States, the FDA approved VeriChip for medical use last October.
“This is not something the man on the street is going to walk in and say, ‘Give me a VeriChip!’” said Angela Fulcher, vice president of marketing for the firm. “But the people who need it can really perceive the advantage.”
In 2002, Jeff and Leslie Jacobs and their then-14-year-old son became the first humans ever implanted with the device.
Jacobs had been fighting Hodgkin's disease and a string of degenerative diseases for more than 25 years, trying experimental treatments, taking a dozen daily pills and making frantic trips to the emergency room.
His wife always carried a scrunched-up list of her husband’s frequently changing medications in her wallet. Soon, she said, she won’t have to worry: doctors will simply scan her husband's arm and use the ID number imbedded there to access his medical records in a VeriChip database.
“It will definitely give me peace of mind,” she said.
Still, VeriChip has yet to catch on with the general public because the infrastructure to support it is not yet in place. Maryland internist Albert Lee has 20 chips in stock at his Bethesda office, but not a single customer, he said, because most hospitals aren’t equipped to detect the device.
Human tagging raises a host of ethical qualms as well. Defenders insist the system is hard to break into, and stress that the chip is only implanted with patient consent.
But privacy advocates decry the device as a forerunner to “Big Brother,” and on the Internet, several fundamentalist Christian groups have lambasted the chip as “the mark of Satan.”
Some researchers worry the system is hackable. At the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, Dr. Avi Rubin last year led a team that cracked the security code encrypting a similar device widely used in remote-control car keys.
Rubin fears the stealthy abuse of human chipping. “Imagine you had a spouse you didn’t trust, and you managed to implant one of these in them when they were sleeping,” he said. Install a chip-scanner near where you believe your spouse is having an affair, and a pager could alert you every time your spouse appeared.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, RFID chips are already prevalent in everyday life. Some 1.8 billion tags have been sold to date; by 2015, that number will exceed 1 trillion as the cost per tag plummets from 23 cents to less than 2 cents, according to industry consultant IDTechEx.
Meanwhile, the tags have been used to speed passage through tollbooths, track inventory at Wal-Mart and take attendance at school. New U.S. passports will be chipped by next year, and some states are considering following suit with driver’s licenses. The U.S. military, which already uses RFID tags to track basics like food supplies, has talked with VeriChip about implanting dog tags under soldiers’ skin, Fulcher said.
RFID technology is poised to revolutionize the American economy even more than the Internet, said Mark Roberti, editor of the RFID Journal. Even so, he dismisses human implants. “The RFID industry in general doesn’t like the idea of tracking people with RFID tags because it raises unnecessary privacy issues and scares people,” he said.
But at Jacobi Medical Center in New York, tagged hospital bracelets already ease patient care, saving more than 10 hours of nursing time a day, according to chief information officer Dan Morreale.
“I would put a chip in myself, absolutely,” he said. “It’s a question of, ‘Does the convenience and benefit outweigh the risk?’ That’s a question you have to answer yourself.”

E-mail: tab2107@columbia.edu
source: http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-04-19/bradley-humanchips
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Two U.S. Employees Injected With RFID Microchips At Company Request
Government Contractor Adopts Controversial VeriChip Implant In Workplace

2-9-6

Cincinnati video surveillance company CityWatcher.com now requires employees to use VeriChip human implantable microchips to enter a secure data center, Network Administrator Khary Williams told Liz McIntyre by phone yesterday. McIntyre, co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID," contacted CityWatcher after it announced it had integrated the VeriChip VeriGuard product into its access control system.
The VeriChip is a glass encapsulated RFID tag that is injected into the flesh of the triceps area of the arm to uniquely number and identify individuals. The tag can be read through a person's clothing, silently and invisibly, by radio waves from a few inches away. The highly controversial device is being marketed as a way to access secure areas, link to medical records, and serve as a payment instrument when associated with a credit card.
According to Williams, a local doctor has already implanted two of CityWatcher's employees with the VeriChip devices. "I will eventually" receive an implant, too, he added. In the meantime, Williams accesses the data center with a VeriChip implant housed in a heart-shaped plastic casing that hangs from his keychain. He told McIntyre he had no qualms about undergoing the implantation procedure himself, and said he would receive an implant as soon as time permits.
"lt worries us that a government contractor that specializes in surveillance projects would be the first to publicly incorporate this technology in the workplace," said McIntyre. CityWatcher provides video surveillance, monitoring and video storage for government and businesses, with cameras set up on public streets throughout Cincinatti.
to read the entire article please visit http://www.rense.com/general69/twogov.htm
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January 30th, 2006

VERICHIP RFID IMPLANT HACKED !

Will Security Problems Quash IPO Plans for Controversial Company ?
The VeriChip can be hacked! This revelation along with other worrisome details could put a crimp in VeriChip Corporation’s planned initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock, say Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre.
The anti-RFID activists and authors of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID" make no bones about their objection to VeriChip’s plans to inject glass encapsulated RFID tags into people. But now they’ve discovered information that could call VeriChip’s entire business model into question.
"If you look at the VeriChip purely from the business angle, it’s a ridiculously flawed product," says McIntyre. She notes that security researcher Jonathan Westhues has shown how easy it is to clone a VeriChip implanted in a person’s arm and program a new chip with the same number.
Westhues, known for his prior work cloning RFID-based proximity cards, has posted his VeriChip cloning demo online at http://cq.cx/verichip.pl.
The VeriChip "is not good for anything," says Westhues, has absolutely no security and "solves a number of different non-problems badly."
The chip’s security issues may spell trouble for those who have had one of the microchips embedded in their flesh. These include eighteen employees in the Mexican Attorney General’s office who use an implanted chip to enter a sensitive records room, and a handful bar patrons in Europe who use the injected chips to pay for drinks. "What are these people going to do now that their chips can be cloned?" says McIntyre. "Wear tinfoil shirts or keep everyone at arm’s length?"
source: http://www.waltbren.com/blog/2006/01/30/verichip-rfid-implant-hacked/