OK, this will seem a bit odd.

But the latest development on the part of the Homeland Security Brain Trust is to put little RFID tags into our passports.  RFID tags are those little stickers that look like they have a circuit board printed on them that you find inside CD or DVD cases (assuming you buy those rather than (ahem) using BitTorrent) or other small, portable, valuable items that stores don’t want you walking out the front door with.  Although I gotta say – a fair percentage of the times that I walk out thru those detector spires, the alarm goes off and nobody twitches an ass cheek.  Because it gives off false alarms a fair percentage of time and as long as you don’t freak and dash, the minimum-wage security drone just figures it’s the scanner fucking up again.

Anyway, from a deranged security paranoid raving nut point of view, having your passport bugged so that you can be tracked wherever you go when you travel overseas is probably a great idea.  You don’t have anything to hide, do you comrade?

But for anyone who is going to the 3rd world and would prefer that they not carry around a glowing beacon that would allow kidnappers to home in on all the Americans in the crowd – the better to abduct you and stick you in a tiger cage and mail your fingers and toes back to your relatives – the idea sucks.  Badly.

The solution has been to microwave your passport.  That is, until some  privacy engineers (and there’s a market niche that’s sure to grow in the coming years) came up with this:

Melanie R. Rieback and Georgi N. Gaydadjiev that won the award for Best
Paper at the USENIX LISA (Large Installation Systems Administration)
conference today. It proposes a “firewall for RFID tags” — a device
that sits on your person and jams the signals from all your personal
wireless tags (transit passes, etc), then selectively impersonates them
according to rules you set. Your contactless transit card will only
send its signal when you authorize it, not when some jerk with an RFID
scanner snipes it as you walk down the street.

Hm. I didn’t realize that those “Speed Pass” cards could be bunged up this way … that someone can just ping you, collect the signal, and then jack that into their own card.  Free gas, tovarisch! Compliments of the stupid capitalist pig in the SUV two lanes over…

I kinda like the idea of walking through a crowd with a RFID jammer in my backpack, leaving a wake of people slapping their electronic devices…

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