Radio-Frequency Identification has been around for a while. Wikipedia says that in 1946 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information.
Now RF-ID is everywhere. Pet owners began putting chips in their dogs and cats years ago. Implanting RFID chips in passports and driver’s licenses is a done deal.
Human beings are getting chip implants. VeriChip has inserted chips in 200 Alzheimer’s patients for a pilot program.
Wealthy Mexicans pay $4,000 to have tiny transmitters implanted under their skin so their location can be constantly tracked. RFID pioneer Digital Angel is a world-leading supplier of Search and Rescue Beacon Equipment (SARBE) and Personal Locator Beacons (PLBs).
Although RFID-embedded driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, anyone with a readily available reader can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge, explains Scientific American.
A number of private companies now sell off-the-shelf data-mining solutions to government spies interested in analyzing mobile-phone calling records and real-time location information.
These companies include ThorpeGlen, VASTech, Kommlabs, and Aqsacom–all of which sell “passive probing” data-mining services to governments around the world.
Time Domain Corporation today introduced the thinnest active tag using UWB for tracking.
Now Bob Woodward’s new book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, says “The Surge” has been a success because of a series of top-secret operations that enabled U.S. military and intelligence agencies to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or “special groups.”
How do they do it? Bob’s not saying.
Cell phone tracking? Image recognition? Some form of RFID tracking using Hello Kitty Tikitags, UWB, optical, the Large Hadron Collider?
JPL engineer Adrian Stoica claims he’s developed a system for “gait recognition” — IDing someone, by their stride — using overhead imagery. Shadows, he says, provide enough gait data to deduce a positive ID.
Related RFID stories on Dailywirelesss include; Spy Squirrels Captured, Swallowing RFID for Science, Tracking Soldiers, Mapping Relief, Integrated RF-ID Tracking, Passports Go Long, Sensor Nets Launch, Passive Cellular Tracking, Kids Unwire Salmon Stream, Weird Outlaw Radio Transmitters, Ultrasonic Teen Repeller, and Audio Beamforming.
