Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl? ... 01/1447202



excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, very invasive?

LIZ MCINTYRE: Well, there have been several already, although RFID isn't everywhere yet, there have been several cases in which it has been used to spy on people. In a store called Tesco in the U.K., sort of like our Wal-Mart, Gillette rigged what they called a ‘smart shelf’ in that store, and each of the packages of Mach III razor blades on the shelf had an RFID tag in it. The shelf had the technology, the reader device to know when someone picked up one of the packages. When that happened, a camera took a close-up mug shot of the shopper without his knowledge or consent, and then later at checkout another close-up mug shot was taken. At end of the day, the picture at the shelf and at checkout were compared, and if there weren't matching photos, then they assumed the person was a shoplifter, and they would follow that person closely the next time. Now never mind that the person had, you know, their mother-in-law pay for the blades or they abandoned them in the magazine rack. That's what happened, and of course, the Guardian newspaper helped us break that story, and people were all up in arms. That shelf disappeared pretty quickly.

The internet of things

A tiny microchip is set to replace the barcode on all retail items but opposition is growing to its use. Sean Dodson investigates

Thursday October 9, 2003
The Guardian

That is old news. Where have you been? You mean you have never met anyone who told you that the government installed a chip in their head to listen to their thoughts? It is a big story on the wacko religious shows. You know, " none shall buy nor cell unless they wear the mark of the beast." I have never read Revelations but I have been told it is all in there. It is a brave new world, partly Huxley and Partly Orwell.




The internet of things


First deployed by the Royal Air Force during the second world war, radio frequency identification (RFid) is a technology that has been rapidly shrinking in size and cost. Secreted into the swipe cards we use to get into work, injected into our pets if we migrate abroad, even attached to the wrists of POWs during the war in Iraq, the ever-smaller tags have become an integral part of our lives without many of us noticing.
That is, until now. Last month, a controversial network to connect many of the millions of tags that are already in the world (and the billions more on their way) was launched at the McCormick Place conference centre on the banks of Lake Michigan. Roughly 1,000 delegates from across the worlds of retail, technology and academia gathered for the launch of the electronic product code (EPC) network. Their aim was to replace the global barcode with a universal system that can provide a unique number for every object in the world. Some have already started calling this network "the internet of things".
The launch of the EPC came just weeks after Wal-Mart - the biggest retailer in the world - demanded that its main 100 suppliers place RFid tags on all its pallets and cases by 2005. But just as the tags begin to be placed on retail items, a small but determined opposition is stirring up a storm of protest.
Chris McDermott is 34. He is married with children and works as a PR manager for a diet firm. In his striped rugby shirt, he looks nothing like your archetypal activist. As he sips a coffee in downtown Swindon, he says he has never protested before. He has a new baby, a new job and is in the middle of moving house. And yet about once a month, McDermott steals an afternoon to stand outside the Sandhurst branch of Tesco to protest about RFid.


The EPC network is run by an organisation called the Auto ID Centre: a global consortium of retailers and academics based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Founded in 1999 by Gillette, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, the consortium now boasts 100 global companies and five of the world's leading research centres, including the University of Cambridge and MIT.
The centre came up with the concept of the internet of things. This poetic description can be expressed as the building of a global infrastructure for RFid tags. You could think of it as a wireless layer on top of the internet where millions of things from razor blades to euro banknotes to car tyres are constantly being tracked and accounted for. A network where, to use the rhetoric of the Auto ID Centre, it is possible for computers to identify "any object anywhere in the world instantly".

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online ... 06,00.html

This, or any other high tech, surveillance methods never seems to link a living, breathing human being as imperfect as any human can be, at the other end of the camera, monitoring the rest of 'us'. It's not, nor has ever been, an illusive or mysterious non-entity doing the surveilling, but some pot-bellied old fool that needs pharmaceutical drugs to stay somewhat healthy who can't wait for his next paycheck to pay off his bills like the rest of us.

L. Frank Baum was probably more attune to that than most when 'The Wizard of Oz' was written, but so many simply saw it as a fun-tastical children's book for innocents.