Reply #8: DemocracyNow! interview with the author

[bananas]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/1447202&mode=thread&tid=25

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with Radio Frequency Identification

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AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined on the telephone by freelance journalist Annalee Newitz. She writes about the intersection of technology, science and culture, a contributing editor at Wired magazine. She's redefining ‘embedded journalist.’ She just had an RFID embedded in her arm. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ANNALEE NEWITZ: Hi.

AMY GOODMAN: It is good to have you with us. Can you explain what you did?

ANNALEE NEWITZ: Sure. So I had been researching an article for Wired about security issues and RFID's, and I read some publicity materials from Verichip in which the company claimed that its chip was -- couldn't be counterfeited, so it was the perfect anti-theft key because, you know, the implication was that no one could steal your keys without actually cutting off your arm -- although they didn't actually say that in the advertising materials. So that sounded very curious to me because I hadn't heard of any RFID's that were completely secure like that so I decided to find out if it was true. A very nice doctor at UCLA agreed to implant me with one of them, very quick operation, and then I visited with an RFID expert named Jonathan Westhughes who has a little Ipod-sized device that he made himself, a quite cheap homemade thing, and it is designed to clone RFID chips which means make a duplicate copy of them basically. And in about 10 minutes, we sat down in a restaurant, crowded place, and he was able to duplicate the signal from my RFID, which meant that if my RFID had been used to open vaults or locks, he would have been able to duplicate that signal simply by basically bumping into me with his device and then going ahead and using what he picked up from it to open up a door.

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