RFID Surveillance Technology: Big Brother
March 31, 2005
Several readers have emailed me asking why, after recently setting up a folder, that notice on my News page suddenly disappeared. The explanation is very simple. Shortly after going live, I received threats of lawsuits, legal actions, etc.
Having already experienced such situations and seeing how little real importance this matter truly had, I decided not to pursue it further. After all, we already have far more serious problems on Earth. Spending energy on such trivialities would only be a waste of time.
That said, for several days we felt as though we’d stepped into a short story by Marcel Aymé. The situation began simply: a website had been created: http://www.dgse.org. Suddenly, a reader pointed out that the addresses dgse.org and dgse.com were redirecting to... a Texas jewelry store, the Dallas Gold and Silver Exchange. Surreal.
A fairly plausible explanation would be that the administrator of the "unofficial DGSE site" had simply... forgotten to renew the domain name fees. The American company, noticing the lapse, seized the opportunity and reclaimed the domains. This led to a series of absurd complications. Indeed, several websites dedicated to various "services" contained links pointing to the "unofficial DGSE site," which then automatically redirected visitors to... the Texas jewelry store! The same thing happened with a page from the American Federation of Scientists (FAS), and likely also with countless other sites across many countries that had copied the same link. In passing, we learned that there are numerous "unofficial sites" within various services, some of which even told us that although the site discussing their activities was managed by a SARL, they "controlled" the information posted there. At this point, the only thing we can say is: "It's their problem."
The domain name market is free and open, with no right of first refusal.
http://www.dgse.fr, for example, is currently for sale by its owner, who suggests "we make him an offer." But it's unlikely to interest the Texas jewelry store, which has already taken http://dgse.com and http://dgse.org, unless it has a branch in France.
http://cnes.com is taken by a company called "Creative Network Service," focused on graphic design. No sale offered.
http://cnes.org is taken and for sale.
http://cnrs.org is registered by an English-speaking owner and for sale.
The domain cnrs.com appears to be vacant, but a reader, Mr. Robert Ash, residing in Japan, informs me that the sect "Church for Natural Redemption through Science" might be interested in acquiring it.
Another reader, Sébastien, points out that if you type:
you land on some surprisingly original content—simply because the channels forgot to register these domain names.
Monday, April 5, 2005:
Received an "honorable anonymous" message: cerp
netcourrier.com. This one sends us to a new website (official? unofficial?).
and specifically to the page:
http://centurion.estsurle.net/dgse.org.htm
Caution: some audio tracks are particularly aggressive—please lower your volume before clicking on certain links. The main homepage includes a section titled "Elite Units," which points to a DGSE page whose URL is: http://centurion.estsurle.net/dgse.htm. However, if you click the link mentioned above—which was included in the message I received—you’ll find the same text, accompanied by the image:
Exhausting...
End of this interlude. Gillette plans to embed 500,000 passive RFID chips into its razors. Very soon, all items will be marked this way, not because, as the company claims, "it will simplify inventory management," but because the job of supermarket sales assistants will vanish entirely. Sales staff will disappear, along with displayers, stock clerks, and warehouse workers. Items will be placed (or restocked) by robots. Labor costs will drop, and unemployment will rise further. Faced with such a surge, such a prospect of rising profit margins, customer complaints and consumer advocacy groups will carry little weight. People will be told that once passed through the checkout, the chips will be deactivated—but they will have no way to verify this.
After embedding microchips into razors, they’ll be placed into... eyeglass frames, clothing, watches, and everything else people carry with them—including dental implants, crowns, and even internal implants. People will be tracked without their knowledge. Detection systems won’t just transmit location data to central computers; they’ll also store this information in the chip’s volatile memory, which quickly becomes "rewritable."
Reality far surpasses fiction—by a wide margin.
As I said, the already minuscule size of these devices (a tenth of a millimeter) means they could be ingested. Biologists claim it’s possible to design chips that could embed themselves in the abdominal wall. They could be implanted into the brains of people previously anesthetized with microwave guns. These objects, undetectable and impossible to remove, could then serve as relays for multiple actions, depending on where they’re implanted in the brain (the trace of implantation will vanish very quickly). For implanted subjects, access to certain locations or entire regions could be blocked, under threat of unbearable pain. Chips whose remote destruction could cause death, induce excruciating headaches, or trigger convulsions could become irresistible tools of coercion. They could deliver subliminal messages for "crowd control," "mob management," or even induce hallucinations. The "rewritable" and remotely accessible chips are already operational, with access via coded key. Big Brother is quietly installing itself within our societies, unnoticed by most. The motivation? "Security" and the power of a small elite over the masses.
We knew this would happen sooner or later—but we didn’t expect it to move so fast. By the way, the company manufacturing the chips ordered by Gillette is called:
Alien Technology
You can’t make this up.
When considering the power source for an active chip, keep in mind that the transmission power required is infinitesimal, and these signals can be picked up by numerous relays or "base stations" (just like mobile phones). Remember that thirty years ago, nanotechnology had already enabled the "carving" of gear pump components...