November 26, 2004 - It is called RFID and it is the technology that the State Department will soon use to track American citizens through their passports. . If you live near Chicago, use the Illinois Tollway to commute, and wave an I-Pass instead of tossing coins in the basket you already use this technology. If you work in a building with a security system that controls access with ID badges or cards that you pass over a sensor you are familiar with how the system works. Business is beginning to use it to track assets. With a network of sensors a tag placed inconspicuously on a laptop computer can transmit the precise location of that piece of equipment to a central database in real time. It is not science fiction – it is available now. (for more information on RFID technology: http://www.rfidjournal.com )

The Government Printing Office has awarded contracts to 4 manufactures to design new passports incorporating RFID chips containing the printed data in the document as well as the holder’s digitized passport photo. When the system is fully implemented an immigration agent will be able to simply wave the passport with its imbedded information at a terminal and the data and photo will be instantly available to a central database for comparison and recording. Of course that is just one of many possible security applications of the technology. As with the inventory-asset control systems marketed to business an imbedded RFID chip can be queried by a remote sensor, silently, unobtrusively and in real time. Sensors installed at the entrance to airports, train stations, or in subway turnstiles would permit instant comparisons with a database of terrorist suspects providing a level of security not possible with the print media technology now in use.

But not all of us have passports and those of us who do leave them in a drawer at home unless we are traveling abroad. A system of sensors in public places won’t gather much information from most of us. But almost all of us carry some form of identification with us – a driver’s license, a social security card, credit cards, or even a draft card. The idea of a national identification card scheme has been bruited about for decades. The Blair Government called with such a scheme for Britain just this week. Combine that idea with RFID chips and a network of sensor is public places and you have the makings of a real time Big Brother system. Before you dismiss that as a science fiction fantasy consider that Wal-Mart is currently implementing just such a system to keep track of the millions of articles in its inventory.

The technology to build such a system is currently available and the costs are modest. The only impediment is political. Our heritage of resistance to a regimented society has stood between us and totalitarian domination of our day to day lives heretofore. We have been free to live without the government keeping track of our movements, our purchases, or our associations. We have been a people whose organic law has zealously guarded our privacy. But that may have changed with everything else on September 11, 2001. Fear of terrorism combined with technological magic may have forever made ideas of privacy quaint and obsolete. It is up to us to decide what shape our quest for security will take. Will it be to decay and degrade the promise of our Constitution that all have the right to be secure in their persons and personal information? It is up to us.