Back in late 2005 when the US State Department announced that all US passport would include an embedded RFID chip (radio frequency identification) similar to those used by such fine retail establishments as Wall-Mart, privacy groups such as the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) spoke out because of concerns that citizens’ personal information would be just floating out in the wireless ether for any RFID-reader-carrying-criminal to snatch. The State Department said that this change was being made to fight terrorism by making it harder for criminals to counterfeit passports. Tech journalists and podcasters such as Cranky Geeks’ John C. Dvorak made light of privacy groups concerns like it was just so much tin-hat paranoia. Everyone had a laugh and then moved on the next tech/pop culture news item.

Recently in an episode of CNET’s Buzz-Out-Loud podcast affable host, Tom Merritt, read a story about a company in England putting the chips in the school uniforms, then joked about English school children running around naked in order to avoid being tracked by parents or school officials. Former co-host, Veronica Belmont, then mentioned that she’d just gotten her “chipped” US passport, to which Merritt quipped, “did you put the chip in your arm?” Maybe I’m having a tin-hat moment but am I the only one who realizes that the bad guys don’t need to actually read the data on the chips for them to do bad things. I don’t want to be the one to give the bad guys the idea, but all they would need is some device that could read the presence of the kind of RFID signal being used in the passports and suddenly they’d be able to pick out the US citizen walking through the crowd. Whether the device is that accurate or not wouldn’t matter because part of inflicting terror is the randomness of the act, not the accuracy. So, everyone with an RFID-passport is figuratively walking around with a government issued white “X” on their backs and all the bad guys need to do is switch on their RFID-blacklights. We are so screwed. JBB