California Blocks RFID Implants In Workers 422
InternetVoting writes "California has passed a bill banning companies from requiring employees to have RFID chips surgically implanted. Already one company has been licensed by the federal government, implanting more than 2000 people. At least one other company — CityWatcher.com, a Cincinnati video surveillance company — already required RFID implants in some employees. 'State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) proposed the measure after at least one company began marketing radio frequency identification devices for use in humans. "RFID is a minor miracle, with all sorts of good uses," Simitian said. "But we shouldn't condone forced 'tagging' of humans. It's the ultimate invasion of privacy.'"
Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
The law prevents RFID in employers, not consumers (Score:1, Insightful)
Tin Foil hat alert? Maybe, maybe not.
Cheers
What happens when.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You work two jobs and you end up getting double implants? I wouldn't want this.
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Libertarians, tell me why RFIDed humans are goo (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the former group gets much more press than the latter, and has largely gotten the terminology to refer only to them even among liberty dorks like us. The former group (among many other bizarre positions) would object strongly to a national credit rating system that dictated where and how you could live if it was run by the government, but have no objection against the credit system we have today simply because its officials are unelected. At the risk of igniting a flame war, Noam Chomsky's writings on anarchism should be read by libertarians or simply "people interested in freedom" just as much as Ayn Rand's.
Don't be mislead (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only about privacy in a euphemistic way, it's about sovereignty of ones body.
If it is forbidden on "privacy" grounds, then the privacy grounds can be addressed, resolved, objection removed and then can become a requirement for work/access-to-services etc.
It should be forbidden because the majority of the population said "No" without having to give a reason.
Sam
Re:Good thing slavery was abolished (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_in_Na
Ironically, the current people doing this are very well connected to those.
Re:Just another step (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The law prevents RFID in employers, not consume (Score:5, Insightful)
If you wait until the Orwellian future is here then it will be too late to do anything about it.
surgery: This is security by difficulty.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of us agree that "security by obscurity" is a bad thing. Relying on closed code and hidden private keys (cough DRM cough) to ensure security just doesn't work well in the end. However, there is a tendency to have more faith in security which relies entirely on the difficulty of achieving some goal. In the case of mechanical locks, this is quite obvious and locks have been designed this way for centuries, the level of "difficulty" based on current technological knowledge and the known level of skill of lock pickers.
In software, we see "difficulty" being important for public-key encryption, which is the corner stone of many cryptographic paradigms. The difficulty, in this case, is finding a pair of primes which can be multiplied to get the private key. However, in this case we can use mathematics to formally identify the time required, according to current technology, to perform this calculation. Thus, we can have some very good, provable assurance that a particular algorithm won't be broken by brute force methods. (Until the next technological breakthrough... quantum cryptography? But that, we are told, is assuredly still far in the future..)
Now, here we have a tendency to embed an identification chip in a person, so that you can be sure that this person is who they say they are. After all, once a chip is embedded surgically, there's no way it can be wrong, right?
Unfortunately this logic is way too dependent on the current idea that surgery is a difficult thing. Already there exist plastic surgeries that take less than a week to recover from. Even the procedure in question I'm sure is quite minor and takes no time at all. So how does embedding a chip in someone add to the sense of security? It's perfectly imaginable to me that in the near future there will be devices which can easily inject such chips into the skin or remove them without requiring a doctor present at all.
So that is why I fail to understand this idea. Even after considering the man-in-the-middle attacks and several other ways to break RFID security, I cannot see that relying in surgical implantation will help much in terms of security. You may as well just get a magnetic card reader so that employees can use their ID cards to get in, and be done with it. Relying on surgery or even fingerprints/retina identification will only add to a false sense of security, as any of these can be fooled. And yes, someone eager enough to break into a high-tech workplace to steal data is going to be be smart enough to have thought of several ways to do it before breakfast.
I'm afraid that when it comes to physical security, people are still better at doing it than machines, and I believe this will be the case for some time.
Re:Libertarians, tell me why RFIDed humans are goo (Score:3, Insightful)
The idol of the free market is relatively new in libertarian thought (modulo the terminology battles again, of course.) Libertarians you can historically connect with the strands today were around well before robust theories of the free market. I think if you time-translated some of the "founding fathers" you'd find they considered the free market a powerful tool, not a good in itself.
I have relatives with numbers on their arms (Score:5, Insightful)
It starts out as a labor issue and they tell you it's ok because you don't have to work there. Then they give them to all convicts. Then mental patients, then the ex-sex offenders, then bullshit pot bust people, then the DUIs, then the green card holders then it becomes an automatic step in the arrest process then your car insurance needs it then your health insurance then your bank and still they keep telling you that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. And if you don't want to use a bank no one is making you. Then everyone in the armed forces gets one then everyone on the public service payroll then all the welfare recipients, then all the school children, then everyone working for a company that has any government contract, then any passport holder. And whoever's left is corralled into special camps. Trust me, I've seen this before.
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is your "choice" now?
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyhow, if this tech ever becomes widespread I may turn to a life of crime. IT would just be too easy to tell if anyone were home or not. Just drive up and down the street with a van equipped w/a powerful rfid scanner and voila.
Regards.
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inaccurate headline (Score:1, Insightful)
Manager - "Do you like your job ?"
Worker - "Yes, It is very fullfilling to work with so many geniuses..."
Manager - "Well...", waving an implant gun, "...would you like to keep it ?"
Worker - "...I do this volontary...of free will...without any one or anything forcing me..."
*Pang!*
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
If an RFID tag can be implanted surgically, it can also be removed and re-implanted into someone else. Consequently, it won't provide any extra security against anyone who is willing to steal nuclear materials for presumably nefarious purposes: they simply capture and kill an employee and take the tag from his cold, dead body.
Sure, you could associate identifying information - fingerprints, faceprints, retina scan, whatever - with the tag, but you could just as easily associate it with normal passcard. No, the only "benefit" from the RFID is that it lets you more easily identify people in casual settings (streets and such). It isn't a security measure, but simply another step towards having everyone tracked 24/7, or in best possible case, just someone's private little power game.
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Easier than that - just kill them, dig out the chip, and, with their chip in your pocket so that you are now "them", kill a bunch of other people, dig out their chips, and empty their bank accounts.
Then put the original chip in a nice pie and send it to your worst enemy. Watch him get blasted away on the evening news.
(okay, its a bit exaggerated today .... but in 10 years?)
Re: Insightful? not (Score:1, Insightful)
Free market philosophy falls flat on its face when you introduce the real-world scenarios of monopolies, cartels, and other dirty practices.
it's my body (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12711274-137
The problem is it doesn't work like that (Score:5, Insightful)
As an example of the former, you can see the last centuries of Rome and the introduction of serfdom. The rich clique that formed the senate:
1. proclaimed themselves not subject to tax
2. raised taxes on everyone else, especially the free peasants (land was the most common pension for soldiers and recruitment incentive, so they eventually had quite a few) to support the ever increasing costs of warfare and the luxury in Rome
3. tried to fix prices _and_ devalue the coin, by law. There goes some of your freedom right there, as a free peasant or small landowner: they already tell you what your produce is worth, and it just became half of what you got for it last year.
4. when people started moving away as a result, they just forbade everyone to move, effectively turning all free peasants into serfs of the empire. In one fell swoop.
I'm sure those peasants still thought they have a choice before step 3. Unfortunately after step 4 it started going downhill fast, and eventually they were not only tied to the land and taxed, but had to work 3 days a week for the local noble too, and some 15 centuries later it had become 6 days a week and no land of their own at all. In some places (e.g., some Polish revolts were against that), serfs could not only be sold, but also rented by burghers, merchants, whatever. The long and painful slide from a free peasant class back to effective slavery, eh?
As a _probable_ example of the latter, well, you can learn a lot about what problems a society had, by the laws they give. That Moses forbade working on Sabbath on penalty of _death_, should tell you that they probably had a _major_ problem there. It also gives you the idea that probably nothing else worked, choice be damned.
At some point, even if you forbid by law to _require_ working on the Sabbath, people will just find weasel ways to require "volunteering" for it. (See the recent EA scandal.) So at some point your choice becomes picking one of X potential employers, all of which require it. You have a choice to take it or starve.
The death penalty on workers on Sabbath is, if you think about it, the ultimate way to stop asking for it right in its tracks. There is no reward someone can promise you, in exchange for maybe getting stoned to death, and no threat they could use to make anyone accept that. Maybe religion could work to motivate someone to go to death, but here religion is what forbade that in the first place. Basically it attacked the supply side of labour, not the demand side.
It makes me wonder how bad it had got, at the very least.
At any rate, sometimes you have to restrict people's "choice" to accept being kicked in the head, because otherwise it can very soon degenerate into something where you have no choice to refuse it.
Finally, don't get me wrong, I'm not against the rich or capitalism... as such. It's just that when one side has disproportionately more bargaining power and power to subvert the system, at some point you have to restrict what they can do with it. Otherwise, if left unchecked, they'll just figure out a way to turn everyone else into their serfs. See, the Romans again.
Re:Don't be mislead (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a dangerous path to go down, especially when you're dealing with human rights. Do you honest trust "majority opinion" on your natural human right (god-given if you prefer) to complete and total self-ownership?
(I put "majority opinion" in quotes because we haven't even defined it -- are we talking 51% or 99% here? Or are we talking about voting for a "representative" who ultimately thinks and acts for himself like every other human being? Look closely, and you'll see that we're talking about the difference between arbitrary oppression and individual sovereignty.)
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have relatives with numbers on their arms (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not nice, but capitalism seldom is nice unless the government steps in and makes some rules (as they are doing here).
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any decent society, no employer has the right to treat their employees as cattle.
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, assuming they're in a financial position to quit their job, or are so highly in demand in their field, that they can find an equivalent position at a moment's notice.
That's a rather large assumption to make. You may well be in that position, but what about the millions of people who don't have the advantages you do? Don't they deserve better than being tracked like freight in a supply chain?
Re:The Right Wing Response (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's go back about 50 years. Back then, it was normal here to get your wage cash on hand at the end of the month. Then gradually checking accounts became usual. And more and more people had them, because they're convenient, and more and more companies realized it's less hassle (and less danger) to simply transfer the money instead of handing out cash.
Today, you cannot get a job here without an account. You want cash? Why? You don't have an account? Sorry, but no job for you. No kidding. No account, no job.
It's a big problem for homeless people here. You don't have a home, you won't get an account. No account, no job. No job, no money to rent an apartment (not to mention that you pretty much need an account to rent one, too). A bank here actually started a service for homeless, sponsored by the city, to get them back onto their feet.
Crazy? Sure, but gradually, piece by piece, we got there. Think it's so impossible that the same might happen with tagging? Today a company requires it, tomorrow you need it to get a passport, then to get a bank account, and you need a bank account... you get the idea.
Re:Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
An invasion of privacy for sure, but not the ultimate.
Having a human "watcher" follow you around all day, taking notes on your behavior would be far worse than an ID tag.
I'm not saying I like the idea, just that it *could* be worse.
Re:Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately it was even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
That's very insightful, but unfortunately, it's even worse than that. (If one can really say worse than the plague.)
1. Not for all. Eastern Europe, for example, was already sparsely populated enough that the plagues had no major impact. So there serfdom continued to be a downwards slide until the 19'th century. I've already given the example of Poland, but things got even worse in Russia, for example.
2. It took some very bloody revolts to really get a positive change, even with the plague. The ruling class didn't just start giving better salaries and conditions when western Europe depopulated. The first (and second and third) attempt again was to fix prices and try to force everyone to work more for less pay, so they can keep their luxury and privileges with less population.
As an example of it, in England and France which were having a jolly good 100 years war, the first effect of the population halving was that the levies on each peasant doubled.
Re:Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 10
Free market capitalism does not require blind acceptance of any working conditions, in fact, abuse that potentially damages workers or reduces their motivation, capacity and desire for work damages the very engine of wealth creation in society, ruining the greatest asset the economy has.
Adam Smith most certainly recognized the disparity in power between employers and employees, and while there are a whole lot of people who like to twist the idea of free market capitalism into an anything-goes feast for the new aristocracy and corporate owners, the fact is that the state has many legitimate roles in a free market. As long as it stays away from protecting the owners and investors from competition.
That's somewhat inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Roman "democracy" was by and large a democracy of the rich. When they voted on anything, the entire population of Rome was divided into 193 centuries, by economic class, and they voted by century. One vote per century. And 98 centuries were made of the senators and the equites. So they may have had a lot of poor, but the rich had the majority of votes by definition. Furthermore, voting stopped completely when they had a majority of 97 centuries either for or against, so quite routinely the poorest never had a chance to cast any vote.
That's democracy of the rich for you, seriously.
2. You have to remember that welfare and populism were limited to the city of Rome itself. No more, no less. If you wanted to vote to tax Egypt or the Gaul to hand out more bread in Rome, everyone would be for it.
Fixing prices for the peasants outside Rome to give cheap bread to the plebs in Rome would have been insanely popular at any point.
3. The only political office I can remember offhand that _required_ one to be a plebeian, was the Tribune Of The Plebs. The requirement seemed to be very flexible however. Remember that Octavian Augustus, among the many titles he accumulated in one hand as Imperator was also a Tribune Of The Plebs. If you can genuinely believe that he was a poor commoner, I have some logging rights to sell in Sahara. They were also routinely bribed by the rich.
4. The late Western Roman Empire was more... weird. Not everything you learned about the peak of the republic still applied. They had increasingly deranged emperors, the praetorian guard started installing and removing emperors itself, they had a _major_ civil war over who gets to be Augustus (emperor) and who gets to be Caesar (vice-emperor) in the tetrarchy, etc. Basically the Western Roman Empire in the 3-4th century AD isn't quite what you've learned about the Roman Republic.
5. Well, just because some people argue nonsense, it doesn't mean they can really rewrite history. What happened, well, already happened, whether the right-wing think-tanks like it or not. Plus, there are a lot of people who are disillusioned with the present and retreat in some rose-tinted illusion that the past was some gentle and noble utopia. (And I don't mean only in modern times, but also see the Renaissance.) Unfortunately, it never really was that great. Even more unfortunately, that sanitized illusion makes them easy to manipulate by those think-tanks I've already mentioned.
And yes, I'm not surprised that the rich in the USA, who want more political power for themselves, would try to paint it that way. "See, giving us more power is good, giving power to the poor is bad." It's only expected, I guess. Unfortunately that's not what actually happened in the real history.
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
All true. I'm just saying that getting chipped isn't the "ultimate invasion of privacy".
Much in that same way as getting kicked in the balls isn't the "ultimate level of pain", but it still sucks.
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
Employee "choice" is largely non-existent. The relation between employees and employers is not one between peers, so a level playing field only exists if the weaker side gets some protection.
Finally, there are many good arguments to limit what can be done, irrespective of "choice".
The Orwellian future IS here.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no secret that the media is increasingly controlled by a few dominant business interests. Neither is it a secret that government is increasingly controlled by business interests.
* Television the major means of thought control
This has been true for as long as I can remember - television is for now, the most powerful mass-populace informational tool. In those areas where the media is controlled by business interests, television is the media they want to control the most. This could be why they hate internet radio so much.
* Population controlled by perpetual war and its attending material shortages
Raised oil prices have a knock-on effect on every aspect of the world economy. There's also outsourcing and automation, which could be viewed as a domestic kind of war against the workers of the Western nations. The beauty of these approaches versus full-scale conventional war is that it has all the advantages (creation of a new poor working class to repress, nice exploitation opportunities for companies) and few of the disadvantages (full-scale war disrupting the market for consumer products, risk of nuclear strike, etc).
* The war ends when the government says it does (i.e. - never)
Not only is "terrorism" a nebulous concept rather than a nation state, or a particular ethnic group, engaging in a war against it has the happy side effect that for each terrorist you squash, you are helping "them" to recruit more. It could last forever, and I suspect that could be the intent.
Now, is all this a conspiracy, or just emergent behaviour which is a natural outcome of capitalism? I think the latter. But whichever it is, the social system we have sucks for allowing it to happen.
Re:Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unemployment rates are high in the western world, and that ignores the fact that most published numbers are average. My company has a branch in one city where unemployment is just short of 20%. If you are not one of the few people with knowledge and/or experience that is actually in demand, you do not have the choice to "go work somewhere else". Your choice is more along the lines of living on unemployment money or moving someplace else where there might be jobs - if you can afford to move, that is.
I work in a position where I have first-hand experience of just how these things work. A lot of the people who ask me for advise would like to quit, except that they can't afford to do it. They've got a car, or a house, that they need to pay, and being unemployed for even a few months might mean losing that.
Now tell me, when you have to choose between you and your family becoming homeless, and getting an implant - how much "choice" do you really have?
Can you even answer that question? Do you support a family?
Re:Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
I deal with the CEO and HR-head level daily. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they think and work. The uncomfortable, bad things are never introduced at the top, always at the bottom.
So you put the rate at something that you can still afford even if your income falls or your expenses rise. But there is no possible way you can pay a mortgage from unemployment benefits, for example.
Obviously, that's also why much of big business is lobbying against it. The official reason they give being that it's too expensive. The real reason - well, we both know it.