The Matrix of Technocracy: The Roots of the Conspiracy

The Matrix of Technocracy:

The Roots of the Conspiracy

by Jon Rappoport

“The cartels of the world become the cartels of the mind.”

-      (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

“If you are nothing more than a biological machine, then what you think doesn’t matter. There is no you. Confirming this, deciding this, is the technocrat’s wet dream.”

-      (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Many independent researchers, writers, and broadcasters have exposed the operation called technocracy. I want to give particular thanks to Patrick Wood, whose investigations are essential. His most recent book is Technocracy Rising.

Consider the term “scientific humanism.” The Oxford Dictionary offers this definition: “A form of humanist theory and practice that is based on the principles and methods of science; specifically the doctrine that human beings should employ scientific methods in studying human life and behaviour, in order to direct the welfare and future of mankind in a rational and beneficial manner…Origin mid-19th century.”

Two items jump out from the page: “…in order to direct the welfare and future of mankind,” and “Origin mid-19th century.”

The first phrase obviously refers to a plan. And the plan emerges from being able to study, at a great height, populations and nations—in order to direct their behavior, in order to place them and move them on a chessboard. “Scientifically.”

Free will? Not important. Free exchange of goods and services? Not important. The unique vision and desire of the individual? Not important. Only science is important—whatever that means.

Science/rule by technology/technocracy becomes the justification for control.

For example:

“We have studied the amount of energy that can be utilized by humans on planet Earth. Given the results, we will plan how to distribute it most humanely and rationally.”

That’s not science. That’s fake science. Whoever determines what is “humane” isn’t doing science. Whoever presumes to know how much usable energy exists on Earth, despite ongoing technological breakthroughs, isn’t doing science. But no matter. Pronouncements can be made to look like science. On behalf of top-down control.

As the Oxford Dictionary mentions, this kind of program had its roots in the mid-19th century.

Well, Darwin published his hypothesis about evolution in 1859. Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Let me now try to summarize thousands of pages of scholarship in a few paragraphs.

Prior to Marx, Engels, and Darwin, the word “humanism” referred to a tradition of philosophy, knowledge, culture, education, and art birthed by the ancient Greeks—coming forward through Rome to the European Renaissance. It elevated human beings. It tended toward greater freedom, less Church repression.

But then, in the mid-19th century, humanism took a sharp turn. It became identified with “the march of science,” the triumph of philosophic materialism (Darwin), and the complete restructuring of nations and societies according to a social, economic, and political plan that would “benefit all” (Marx, Engels).

Humanism was stripped down to “scientific humanism.”

In succeeding generations, all the way up to today, intellectuals and scientists and technologists have adopted the viewpoint that, since they can see the whole of society from above, and since they can understand its workings in clearer and evermore specific terms, and since they understand the vast field of natural resources, they can and should, quite naturally, and as a matter of course, plan and plot the future of humanity.

Their impulse was, behind the scenes, aided and abetted by a quite different cast of characters, who wanted a new world order, a political and economic management system for the entire planet (now known as Globalism).

This is, in effect, a two-tier operation. At the top are the Rockefeller Globalists; and under them, millions of useful high-IQ idiots who love to play chess with the world population.

The propaganda wing of this operation insists, at every turn: the only “solution” for planet Earth is the group solution. The group, the mass, the collective.

It is unthinkable that The Individual would have anything to contribute.

Well, when you stop and consider it, this is the mantra of today’s collective society: the individual is extinct.

The staging of civilization’s ebbs and flows, victories and defeats, always has the aim of discounting and reducing the role of the individual. Whatever else is intended, that is intended.

I’m not trying to discourage any and every group response—but I am saying, without question, that every major covert op is played in order to eradicate the idea of the individual. This is basic mind control. This is the reason mind control exists: to elevate “group” over “individual.”

Mind control tries to make individuals think of themselves as helpless pieces on the chessboard. Mind control tries to make individuals surrender their free will. Mind control tries to make individuals believe they have no place in the modern world. Rather, they must be part of a group; otherwise, they’re invisible.

If you could walk into a person’s mind, as if it were a post office, and if you could get rid of every letter and package that extolled, or surrendered to, The Group, you would see that person rise to a new height. You would see a renewal on a grand scale.

But introduce a fact or idea that challenges The Group and alarms go off. “Reject that fact! Reject it! It’s false! It has to be false! Maintain stability!”

“Stability being restored. The structure is intact. Standards are being rebooted. Normality is being reasserted. Resume standard operations.”

In Adjustment Team (1954), Philip K Dick wrote:


“You were supposed to have been in the Sector when the [mind control] adjustment began. Because of an error you were not. You came into the Sector late — during the adjustment itself. You fled, and when you returned it was over. You saw, and you should not have seen. Instead of a witness you should have been part of the adjustment. Like the others, you should have undergone changes…something went wrong. An error occurred. And now a serious problem exists. You have seen these things. You know a great deal. And you are not coordinated with the new configuration.“

What I call the Reality Manufacturing Company wants everyone to have the same inner configuration.

That is the basis of collectivism at the deepest level.

At the outbreak of World War 2, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) began making plans for the post-war world.

The question it posed was this: could America exist as a self-sufficient nation, or would it have to go outside its borders for vital resources?

Predictably, the answer was: imperial empire.

The US would not only need to obtain natural resources abroad, it would have to embark on endless conquest to assure continued access.

The CFR, of course, wasn’t just some think tank. It was connected to the highest levels of US government, through the State Department. A front for Rockefeller interests, it actually stood above the government.

Behind all its machinations was the presumption that planned societies were the future of the planet. Not open societies. (And “the interests of the US” would ultimately be subordinated to the domination of one-planet, new-world-order Globalists.)

Through wars, clandestine operations, legislation, treaties, manipulation of nations’ debt, control of banks and money supplies, countries could be turned into “managed units.”

Increasingly, the populations of countries would be regulated and directed and held in thrall to the State.

And the individual? He would go the way of other extinct species.

Nowhere in these formulas was the individual protected. He was considered a wild card, a loose cannon, and he needed to be demeaned, made an outsider, and characterized as a criminal who opposed the needs of the collective.

As the years and decades passed, this notion of the collective and its requirements, in a “humane civilization,” expanded.

On every level of society, people were urged to think of themselves as part of a greater group. The individual and his hopes, his unique dreams, his desires and energies, his determination and will power…all these were portrayed as relics of an unworkable and deluded past.

In the planned society, no one rises above the mass, except those men who run and operate and propagandize the mass.

The onrush of technocracy gears its wild promises to genetic manipulation, brain-machine interfaces, and other automatic downloads assuring “greater life.” No effort required. Plug in, and ascend to new heights.

Freedom? Independence? Old flickering dreams vicariously viewed on a screen.

Individual greatness, natural imagination, natural creative power? A sunken galleon loaded with treasure that, upon closer investigation, was never there to begin with.

The Plan is all that is important. The plan involves universal surveillance, in order to map the lives of billions of people, move by move, in order to design systems of control within which those billions live, day to day.

But the worst outcome of all is: the individual cannot even conceive of his own life and future in large terms. The individual responds to tighter and control with a shrug, as if to say, “What difference does it make?”

He has bought the collectivist package. His own uniqueness and inner resources are submerged under layers of passive acceptance of the consensus.

And make no mistake about it, this consensus reality, for all its exaltation of the group, is not heraldic in any sense. The propagandized veneer covers a cynical exploitation of every man, woman, and child.

Strapped by an amnesia about his own freedom and what it can truly mean, the individual opts for a place in the collective gloom. He may grumble and complain, but he fits in.

He can’t remember another possibility.

Every enterprise in which he finds himself turns out to be a pale copy of the real thing.

The deep energies and power and desire for freedom remain untapped.

—Yet a struggle continues to live.

It lives in the hidden places of every individual who wants out, who wants to come back to himself, who wants to stride out on a stage.

Freedom and power again. The shattering of amnesia.

In this stolen world.

A new stage play, titled:

The Extinct Individual Returns.

In this new play, dominoes of the collective begin to fall. The stinking structure collapses, a wing here and a wing there.

The vast sticky web called “the people” begins to disintegrate.

A new instructive message appears on screens: “The Collective=Crazy.”

The pseudo-scientific plot to make humans pieces on the grand chessboard, biological machines to manipulate at will, with “inputs” that “elicit predictable responses”—this great plan and great deception eventually becomes a burnt cinder in the annals of failed histories.

 

About the Author

 

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his freeNoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

**This an excerpt of an introduction I wrote to my second collection, Exit From the Matrix. To read about this mega-collection, click here.

From No More Fake News via http://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/03/15/matrix-technocracy-roots-conspiracy/

For more information about technocracy see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/technocracy  

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2011: A Brave New Dystopia

2011: A Brave New Dystopia

By Chris Hedges

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled. 

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission.

But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. 

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.”  “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered.

The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass. 

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”

The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B.

The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”

Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security.

The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning — who has now been imprisoned for seve[ral] months without being convicted of any crime — mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables.

 We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass — African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message — DO NOT TRY THIS.

The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

From TruthDig @ http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/

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How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People

How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People

A privacy activist argues that the devices pose new security risks to those who carry them, often unwittingly

By Katherine Albrecht

Radio-frequency identi­fication (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents.

Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.

Worldwide, legislators have done little to address those risks to citizens.

If you live in a state bordering Canada or Mexico, you may soon be given an opportunity to carry a very high tech item: a remotely readable driver’s license. Designed to identify U.S. citizens as they approach the nation’s borders, the cards are being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to save time and simplify border crossings. But if you care about your safety and privacy as much as convenience, you might want to think twice before signing up.

The new licenses come equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be read right through a wallet, pocket or purse from as far away as 30 feet. Each tag incorporates a tiny microchip encoded with a unique identification number. As the bearer approaches a border station, radio energy broadcast by a reader device is picked up by an antenna connected to the chip, causing it to emit the ID number. By the time the license holder reaches the border agent, the number has already been fed into a Homeland Security database, and the traveler’s photograph and other details are displayed on the agent’s screen.

Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for the cards are unaware of the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. 

What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual. And the driver’s licenses are just the latest addition to a growing array of “tagged” items that consumers might be wearing or carrying around, such as transit and toll passes, office key cards, school IDs, “contactless” credit cards, clothing, phones and even groceries.

RFID tags have been likened to barcodes that broadcast their information, and the comparison is apt in the sense that the tiny devices have been used mainly for identifying parts and inventory, including cattle, as they make their way through supply chains. Instead of having to scan every individual item’s Universal Product Code (UPC), a warehouse worker can register the contents of an entire pallet of, say, paper towels by scanning the unique serial number encoded in the attached RFID tag. That number is associated in a central database with a detailed list of the pallet’s contents. 

But people are not paper products. During the past decade a shift toward embedding chips in individual consumer goods and, now, official identity documents has created a new set of privacy and security problems precisely because RFID is such a powerful tracking technology. Very little security is built into the tags themselves, and existing laws offer people scant protection from being surreptitiously tracked and profiled while living an increasingly tagged life.

Beyond Barcodes

The first radio tags identified military aircraft as friend or foe during World War II, but it was not until the late 1980s that similar tags became the basis of electronic toll-collection systems, such as E-ZPass along the East Coast. And in 1999 corporations began considering the tags’ potential for tracking millions of individual objects. In that year Procter & Gamble and Gillette (which have since merged to become the world’s largest consumer-product manufacturing company) formed a consortium with Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers, called the Auto-ID Center, to develop RFID tags that would be small, efficient and cheap enough to eventually replace the UPC barcode on everyday consumer products.

By 2003 the group had developed a working version of the technology and attracted in­­vest­ment from more than 100 companies and government agencies. The tags’ promoters promised the tiny chips would revolutionize inventory management and counterfeiting prevention [see “RFID: A Key to Automating Everything,” by Roy Want; Scientific American, January 2004].

To kick-start government adoption of the technology, the General Services Administration (GSA), a federal bureau that manages purchasing for other government institutions, issued a memo in 2004 urging the heads of all federal agencies “to consider action that can be taken to advance the [RFID] industry.” Suddenly, virtually every agency, from the Social Security Administration to the Food and Drug Administration, began announcing RFID trials. 

During the same period, similar initiatives were under way around the world. In 2003 the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations agency that sets global passport standards, endorsed the use of RFID tags in passports. ICAO now calls for their use in all scannable “e-passports.” Today dozens of countries, including the U.S., issue e-passports with RFID tags embedded in their covers.

Since their debut, the new passports have been controversial on both privacy and security grounds. In a 2006 report one ICAO official promised that encryption measures would provide a “level of protection [that] should reassure the most anxious passport holder that his personal data cannot be read without his knowledge.”

Security experts quickly proved otherwise. In 2007 British security consultant Adam Laurie cracked the encryption code on a U.K. passport and “skimmed,” or remotely read, its personal information—while it was still sealed in its mailing envelope. Around the same time, German security consultant Lukas Grunwald copied the data from a German passport’s embedded chip and encoded it into a different RFID tag to create a forged document that could fool an electronic passport reader. Investigators at Charles University in Prague, finding similar vulnerabilities in Czech e-passports, wrote that it was “a bit surprising to meet an implementation that actually encourages rather than eliminates [security] attacks.”

Yet these demonstrated security problems have not slowed the adoption of RFID. On the contrary, the technology is being deployed for domestic ID cards around the world. Malaysia has issued some 25 million contactless national identity cards. Qatar is issuing one that stores the cardholder’s fingerprint in addition to personal information. And in what industry observers are calling the single largest RFID project in the world, the Chinese government is spending $6 billion to roll out RFID-based national IDs to nearly one billion citizens and residents.

There is an important difference, however, between other nations’ RFID-based ID cards and Homeland Security’s new driver’s licenses. Most countries’ contactless national IDs and e-passports have adopted an RFID tag that meets an industry standard known as ISO 14443, which was developed specifically for identification and payment cards and has a degree of security and privacy protection built in. In contrast, U.S. border cards use an RFID standard known as EPCglobal Gen 2, a technology that was designed to track products in warehouses, where the goal is not security but maximum ease of readability.

Whereas the ISO 14443 standard includes rudimentary encryption and requires tags to be close to a scanner to be read (a distance measured in inches rather than feet), Gen 2 tags typically have no encryption and only minimal data safeguards. To skim the data from an encrypted ISO 14443 chip, you have to crack the encryption code, but no special skills are required to skim a Gen 2 tag; all you need is any Gen 2 reader. Such readers can be purchased readily and are in common use in warehouses worldwide. A hacker or crim­inal armed with one could skim a border card through a purse, across a room, even through a wall.

As of this past April [2008], more than 35,000 Washington State motorists had signed up for en­­hanced driver’s licenses, and other border states, including Arizona, Michigan and Vermont, have agreed to participate in the program. New York State will begin making the new licenses available to its residents after Labor Day.

But the possibility that the security of such cards could be compromised is just one reason for concern. Even if tighter data-protection measures could someday prevent unauthorized access to RFID-card data, many privacy advocates worry that remotely readable identity documents could be abused by governments that wish to tightly monitor and control their citizens.

China’s national ID cards, for instance, are encoded with what most people would consider a shocking amount of personal information, including health and reproductive history, employment status, religion, ethnicity and even the name and phone number of each cardholder’s landlord. More ominous still, the cards are part of a larger project to blanket Chinese cities with state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. Michael Lin, a vice president for China Public Security Technology, a private company providing the RFID cards for the program, unflinchingly described them to the New York Times as “a way for the government to control the population in the future.” And even if other governments do not take advantage of the surveillance potential inherent in the new ID cards, ample evidence suggests that data-hungry corporations will.

 

Living a Tagged Life

If the idea that corporations might want to use RFID tags to spy on individuals sounds far-fetched, it is worth considering an IBM patent filed in 2001 and granted in 2006. The patent describes exactly how the cards can be used for tracking and profiling even if access to official databases is unavailable or strictly limited. Entitled “Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-Tagged Items in Store Environments,” it chillingly details RFID’s potential for surveillance in a world where networked RFID readers called “person tracking units” would be incorporated virtually everywhere people go—in “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] mu­­se­­ums”—to closely monitor people’s movements.

According to the patent, here is how it would work in a retail environment: an “RFID tag scanner located [in the desired tracking location]... scans the RFID tags on [a] person.... As that person moves around the store, different RFID tag scanners located throughout the store can pick up radio signals from the RFID tags carried on that person and the movement of that person is tracked based on these detections.... The person tracking unit may keep records of different locations where the person has visited, as well as the visitation times.”

The fact that no personal data are stored in the RFID tag does not present a problem, IBM explains, because “the personal information will be obtained when the person uses his or her credit card, bank card, shopper card or the like.” The link between the unique RFID number of the tag and a person’s identity needs to be made only once for the card to serve as a proxy for the person thereafter. Although IBM envisioned tracking people via miniature tags in consumer goods, with today’s RFID border cards there is no need to wait for such individual product tags to become widespread. Washington’s new driver’s licenses would be ideally suited to the in-store tracking application, because they can already be read by Gen 2 inventory scanners in use today at stores such as Wal-Mart, Dillard’s and American Apparel.

A tracking infrastructure will become increasingly fruitful to marketers as more people begin carrying, and even wearing, RFID-tagged items. At present, tens of millions of contactless credit and ATM cards containing RFID tags are in circulation, along with millions of employee access badges. RFID-based public-transit passes, widely used in Europe and Japan, are also coming to U.S. cities. IBM’s person tracking unit is still only a patent, but an English amusement park called Alton Towers provides a living illustration of RFID’s tracking potential. On entering the park, each visitor is offered an RFID wristband encoded with a unique ID number. As people enjoy the attractions, a network of RFID readers placed strategically throughout the park detects each wristband as it comes within range and triggers nearby video cameras. Candid footage of each individual is stored in a file labeled with the wristband ID number, then made available to the customer on a keepsake DVD at the end of the day.

If RFID tags can enable an amusement park to capture detailed, personalized videos of thousands of people a day, imagine what a determined government could do—not to mention marketers or criminals. That is why my colleagues in the privacy community and I have so firmly opposed the use of RFID in government-issued identity documents or individual consumer items. As far back as 2003, my organization, CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)—along with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and 40 other leading privacy and civil liberties advocates and organizations—recognized this threat and issued a position paper that condemned the tracking of human beings with RFID as inappropriate.

In response to these concerns, dozens of U.S. states have introduced RFID consumer-protection bills—which have all been either killed or gutted by heavy opposition from lobbyists for the RFID industry. When the New Hampshire Senate voted on a bill that would have imposed tough regulations on RFID in 2006, a last-minute floor amendment replaced it with a two-year study instead. (I was appointed by the governor to serve on the resulting commission.) That same year a California bill that would have prohibited the use of RFID in government-issued documents passed both houses of the legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On the federal level, no high-profile consumer-protection bills related to RFID have been passed. Instead, in 2005, the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force praised RFID applications as “exciting new technologies” with “tremendous promise for our economy” and vowed to protect RFID from regulation or legislation.

In the European Union, regulators are at least examining the situation. The European Commission—the executive arm of the E.U.—has acknowledged the potential for serious privacy problems with RFID and opened a public comment period earlier this year. As of July, when this issue went to press, recommendations stemming from the public comments were set to be released later in the summer, but expectations for any consumer-privacy regulations were low. In a March 2007 speech, E.U. commissioner for information society and media Viviane Reding announced that the commission would not regulate RFID but instead would allow businesses to regulate themselves. “I am here to tell you that on RFIDs, there is not going to be a regulation,” she said. “My view is that we should underregulate rather than overregulate so that this sector can take off.”

Unfortunately, industry self-regulation has little force when it comes to protecting the public from RFID risks. EPCglobal, the industry body that now sets technical standards for RFID tags, also produced a set of guidelines for the use of the chips in retail. The organization’s recommendations require, among other things, notice to consumers whenever products contain RFID tags—for instance, in the form of a recognizable RFID logo. Yet when Checkpoint Systems, a member company of EPCglobal, designed RFID tags to be hidden in the soles of shoes—in clear violation of the organization’s own provisions — Mike Meranda, then president of EPCglobal, told me that since the guidelines were voluntary, there was nothing he or his organization could do about it.

The Washington State Department of Licensing reassures citizens that their personal information is safe because the RFID tag in an enhanced driver’s license “doesn’t have a power source” and “doesn’t contain any personal identifying inform­ation”—even though those facts have no bearing on whether the card can be used for tracking. For some people, a false sense of assurance provided by such official mollifications could be dangerous. The National Network to End Domestic Violence, a group that vocally opposes the use of RFID in identity documents and consumer products, has submitted legislative testimony describing how abusers could use the technology to stalk and monitor their victims.

Meanwhile the RFID train is barreling forward. Gigi Zenk, a spokesperson at Washington’s licensing agency, recently confirmed that there are 10,000 enhanced licenses “on the street now—that people are actually carrying.” That’s a lot of potential for abuse, and it will only grow. The state recently mustered a halfhearted response, passing a law that designates the unauthorized reading of a tag “for the purpose of fraud, identity theft, or for any other illegal purpose” as a class C felony, subject to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Nowhere in the law does it say, however, that scanning for other purposes such as marketing—or perhaps “to control the population”—is prohibited. We ignore these risks at our peril.

Note: This article was originally published with the title, "RFID Tag--You're It".

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katherine Albrecht holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University and is director of CASPIAN, a 15,000-member consumer privacy organization opposing retail surveillance. Since 2003 she has worked to expose and prevent unethical uses of RFID in products and in people. She regularly testifies before legislators and delivered a keynote address at a workshop on RFID and privacy held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also co-authored two books describing how corporate and governmental uses of RFID could threaten individual privacy and security.

From New Scientist - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-rfid-tags-could-be-used

See also ‘The Implanted Radiofrequency Identification Chip’  - http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/the_implanted_radiofrequency_identification_chip.htm

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