Recorded, produced, and written by Sonali Kolhatkar

On December 6th and 7th, a small group of industry executives and government officials met at the Long Beach Hilton to have the first ever symposium on Radio Frequency Identification or RFID Technology. It is a fairly new technology that has both corporate and government sectors excited about the potential of identifying and tracking products and people. Privacy advocates have warned against the implemention of RFID technology, calling them “spy-chips”. Today we bring you the sounds of the Long Beach conference. It was organized by the National Cargo Security Council to focus on how the supply chain for retailers and shippers can be made more secure through RFID, both to maintain profits and “counter terrorism”.

I was the only outside reporter at this intimate gather of 75-80 people and I faced a few challenges in getting the speakers to use the microphone. John Hill is a founding member of AIDC100, which is a think tank on Auto identification technology. He shares some of the history of RFID.

John Hill: For 30 years now, automatic identification of data capture technologies have played a critical role in the supply chain equation. Going back to bar coding, going to voice data entry technology and RFID.

John Hill; What is it? It’s the use of RFID technology to identify items carrying RFID tags. It’s reliable when it’s properly applied and properly deployed. And we need to continue to push the envelope toward some of the targets that retailers have identified because the potential from the point of view of benefit is undeniable. How does it work? An RFID tag is attached to an item. That tag, and this is actually one of the very first – it was used at GM in 1984 – has a receive antenna and broadcast antenna. It’s energized by an antennae located along the path of tag-item movement. Tag captures a bit of the energy coming out of the antenna – powers up in effect and broadcasts back its unique identity. It’s as simple and as complex as that.

John Hill, a founding member of AIDC100. Mark Roberti is the editor of RFID Journal – a leading industry journal on RFID and it’s potential and current uses. He was one of the main speakers at the conference - I asked him to describe exactly how information is input into an RFID tag.

Mark Roberti: The reader send EM waves and those waves are interpreted by the chip and they are encoded the way you would download a file wirelessly to your hard drive – so the reader is the writer too – Q: How difficult would it be for somebody who did want to disrupt supply chains to take a reader and input the wrong information into RFID tags? Answer: It’s difficult - Some tags are read only – they can’t be written to at all – they are programmed with a number at the factory and that cannot be changed at all – some tags are write once and then read many times, so I can write a number to it but I can’t re-write a number to it. Some have the capability to lock the number so if I wrote an EPC number to it, I would lock that area and you would need a code to unlock and change it. So it’s not very easy to do that.

RFID is not the first hi-tech approach to tracking goods and people. Currently the use of GPS, or Global Positioning Systems is widespread. I spoke with an attendee of the conference - Jim Thomas, the Director of the Electronics Systems Group at Coleman Technologies in Orlando. Florida.

Jim Thomas: Q. What can RFID provide that GPS can’t? A. Well RFID is more of a short range type device – you want to know if a particular product has moved past a particular point. It might be in a conveyor belt system or it might be in a production of moving a car along in an assembly line. Or it may be your product from the point of manufacturing to distribution. GPS is more of a global positioning system that gives me much better accuracy of where that is but normally by itself and RFID you need a wireless communication method tot get it back to someone who can use that info.

Also at the conference were representatives from several corporations that are collaborating with government efforts on post 9-11 counter terrorism efforts at supply chain security. Sean Dettloff is a manager in Asset Protection at Starbucks Coffee Corporation. He explains that an additional benefit of RFID tracking for Starbucks is combating theft and other profit losses.

Sean Dettloff: Commercial armed robbery will always be probably the main risk that we focus against in our enterprise – this is an example of containers that didn’t quote have coffee in them – potential product tampering cases. And we had a partner who we – and we call our employees partners – you’ll learn the Starbucks lingo here. He thought it would be nice to produce Satan’s blend as opposed to House blend. So it was pretty easy to identify who did it – it was a guy wearing a cape – he thought he was a vampire. And of course at the bottom of our slide we see some WTO protests, some intl –protests and that’s just part of being a global icon and an American company.

The implementation of RFID technology is based on which large corporations are pushing its use.

Mark Roberti: It also helped that Walmart, and Gillette, PNG and some other companies were backing the technology.

Mark Roberti of RFID Journal explains that ultimately the importance of knowing everything about one’s products and workers enables one to protect one’s brand – the most valuable asset of any corporation:

Mark Roberti: Earlier this year we found a cow in the US had mad cow disease – it was another scare that turned out to be wrong- RFID has the potential to track a specific cow from the time it is born to the time it’s slaughtered and then track that cow all the way to a store and potentially to your home. That means that if there is a recall and you’ve bought something, they can know specifically the cow that gave the meat and they can recall the meat that is potentially infected. One of the things I find scary about mad cow – when they tried to trace back other cows in the herd – they got only 50% of the other cows in the herd – those cows could have been infected and they were lost. FDA is trying to get the pharma companies to use RFID to track drugs in the supply chain to make sure they are not counterfeit. 8-10% of all drugs in the global chain are counterfeit – huge public health problem. Cargo security the issue that this conference is about, I think this is a huge issue. There’s also investments in protecting your brand. If it’s your container with the dirty bomb in it – that’s not good for your brand.

You’re listening to a special report on RFID technology, from a recent intimate conference of industry and corporate officials in Long Beach. The seminar chairman was affiliated to Savi Technology, one of the US manufacturers of RFID chips. The exhibit hall was full of displays by US manufacturers of RFID tags – adoption of this technology would be a huge windfall for these companies. John Greaves of the consulting firm Deloitte and Touche expressed the fear of outside competition, especially from China:

John Greaves: What you’ve got in the Asia community – challenges – that China belongs to the WTO. WTO and China have started to flex their muscles and said we don’t need to do it your way – how about you do it our way because we make 76% of what you land in Long Beach – 76% of what you buy in America. So how about if we make the tags, the number, you pay us to join our EPC and we do a very nice line down in Singapore to make electronic security seals for the containers.

One way of looking at RFID is that it is simply the latest step in tracking devices that will help improve efficiency in the private sector. But it’s not just the private sector, but also the military that’s interested. Mark Nelson of Savi Technology:

Mark Nelson: Retired General John Cockburn who was responsible for extending an Intransit visibility network for the US DOD, once said the uses of RFID are limited only by the imagination.

General Denny Jackson, a retired US military officer, now works at Oak Ridge Laboratories talked about the use of RFID technology in recent US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Denny Jackson: I think Darwin often gets a bad rep – it’s not even only the smart survive, it’s the quick. It’s not the smart that eat the dumb or the strong that eat the weak, it’s the quick that eat the slow. I want to talk a little bit about the quick eating the slow – hopefully we were the quick and they were the slow. Back to my thanksgiving day of 2001, we were trying to get Marines into a place called Rhino in Southern Afghanistan and there were multiple challenges – one of the things concerned about was munitions. We were worried about bottled water – at the height of Iraqi freedom, we were drinking about 30 Florida swimming pools a day of bottled water – doesn’t include the reverse osmosis water purification. The problem with this water was our contact with the Nestle plant in Islamabad. Issue was security – was the product secure? Did they have a process that made a product that we could drink? Was their process uncorrupted? Were their shipping lanes secure? We couldn’t even guarantee security in through Afghanistan much less Islamabad. So we had to work through these kinds of things. Thanksgiving day was significant to me because that was the first day that Tom Franks mentioned to me the notion of Iraq. Talking with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld that morning and there was a brief comment from Wolfowitz who said, “Think about Iraq”. It took us 18 months from the time we discussed that until we could – 18 months and 1.4 billion dollars worth of investment in infrastructure before we could actually do that. The thing is that context matters – here is the context – 25 nations from Kenya to Kazhakstan on a diagonal about 5000 miles from end to end – 2.5 times the size of the US, 18 different languages, multiple dialects, hundreds of tribes – you know it – you ship to there you ship from there –you’re involved in instrumenting a lot of these places.

Retired General Denny Jackson, with the Oak Ridge Laboratories. RFID is clearly a technology that has been useful in the efficiency of empire building. Jackson explains:

I went to Oak Ridge- about 6 months before 9-11 to see how we could better template the Cent Com region. One of the things I ran into was this RFID technology idea and so we kind of worked out way through that in Afghanistan and then when it came time for Iraq, we said, we want the DOD standard to be RFID, not 2-D bar code. We had a little bit of resistance but in a war time emergency situation, service loyalties kinda go away. The Navy says, wait a minute, we put stuff on a big grey tub and it goes places and we know where it is when we get there – the Air Force says I got this little silver tube and it starts at air force base and flies at 600 mph and it lands KCIA and I know what got on it and guess what – nothing got off along the way. All of a sudden along came the expeditionary air force pre-positioning the material all over, putting locations all over the ground, and then finding out that --- did find it after all – picking it up and moving it somewhere else and the Air Force said, wow – with all of these moving parts, we probably do need these kinds of things.

After describing how the US’s empire building in Iraq and Afghanistan were better managed through the use of RFID, the Retired General Denny Jackson mused about the future of the world:

As I think about it, what is the future going to look like? Do we have global chaos? I don’t think so. What about America as a global cop? Well you can argue it but I don’t think that’s going to happen either – it’ll have the same effects that the Reagan doctrine had on the USSR. What about American Empire? I doubt it but some people have that perception.

Here at home, RFID is on the verge of becoming widely used. John Hill, founding member of AIDC100:

John Hill: What I envision and I would hope that you would join me in this is a system that combines the use of RFID technology, GPS, and an information systems infrastructure that can handle the volumes of data that RFID will capture, process and transmit in a manner that enable us to identify right down to the seal level to identify goods in transit from manufacturing point to point of consumption.

I spoke with John after his presentation and asked him to explain where he thinks the technology will go:

John Hill: Q: you talked about how ultimately every item on the planet will be tagged with RFID? Do you see a future that is smoothly running in terms of industry govt and security issues? Answer: I think maybe that could be the case but I think there’s a major roadblock at the problem – the importance of normalized global standards. Until those standards are agreed upon internationally - the ability to track everything on the planet in a meaningful way is going to be delayed. From the point of view of whether the technology is ready to identify consumer items, such things as a box of cheerios – or a charcoal grill – much is going to depend on the value of the item being identified and the cost of the tag used to id it. If there is an imbalance there or a mismatch between tag cost and item value, then it will be delayed for a long time. But at least theoretically, it’s exciting to think that you could open your fridge door and it speaks to you saying that unless you drink the milk today it’s going to go sour and you had better go out and buy a new one – that is technically possible today.

Q. What implication does the concept everything on the planet being tagged have on the consumer privacy? A. Big issue! And one we could more time than you and I have time for. But there are methods today for encrypting the tags, for killing the tags at the supermarket check out counter – once it’s read it would be neutralized and unreadable. The second thing that people do misunderstand is that these tags have a limited range. I’ve heard people say that I’ll be walking down the street with a bag full of groceries and some spy satellite will be able to figure out who I am and what I’ve just bought. Not true. The technology permits reading consumer level items probably at or less than a foot away.

Q. If it is easy to kill the tags, then why would RFID be good for security? A. I’m only talking here about consumer items. I’m not talking about killing a tag on a maritime container or an air cargo container. I’m only talking about the tags that you or I might buy at the store.

Q. So there might have to be some sort of govt. regulation to decide what sort of tags can protect consumer privacy? A. Maybe, I hope not – I think that once people become more familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the technology, the problem will slowly but surely go away. In the old days, consumers reacted violently in opposition to the bar code for the same reasons that we are talking about – once they learned that the price was not in the bar code – the code identified the item, not the price – the computer which backs up the scanner at the checkout counter is where the price resides. And once people begin to understand that and see the technology work and work well and speed throughput at the check out counter, opposition melted away. Didn’t happen overnight.

Q. I’ve heard that RFID tags could be used to determine consumer patterns particularly for marketing uses. This is where the issue of privacy can come in. A. That’s a good question. Here consumers – we all agreed that we do not want unwanted spam, a national initiative got underway. I signed up and I’m not getting phone calls from telemarketers and I’m getting much less spam-type email. The same can be true at the supermarket or retail store level – if you want us to track your purchases, if you want us to keep track of what you’ve done over the past month, or year then sign for same. If you don’t we won’t do it. Or vice verse, if you don’t want us to do it, sign here.

John Hill is a founding member of the AIDC100. I asked him to tell me what this group is:

John Hill; The AIDC100 is a small group of about 80 people who are pioneers in bar-coding, voice technology, RFID and related data capture devices. And it was formed probably 7-8 years ago – it’s an invitation only org. whose primary purpose is disseminating the gospel on auto ID data capture in a manner that is both palatable for audiences and bang-on in terms on accuracy. Question: What do you mean palatable? Answer: Understandable, demystifying the technology and making certain that the messages being put out on RFID are indeed accurate. Q: These 80 people – what sectors are they from? A: Virtually all from technology sector – inventors, and developers and applications people focused exclusively on auto ID data capture tech and the systems needed to make those technologies work.

I asked Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal to tell me what he thought was the main driving force behind the development of RFID technology:

Mark Roberti: I’m trying to understand the main issues at this conference – one of course is the issue of govt. Security and terrorism and the other is the issue of commerce security wrt theft and counterfeit. In your opinion which one is driving RFId first, which one is coming first? I’m trying to understand the dynamics. A. Actually neither is driving it. What’s driving interest in RFID is the efficiency that can be gained by having better real time data about where your products are. As an extension of that you have the ability to track where it’s going missing, where it’s lost, where it’s stolen, where it’s damaged in the supply chain and that’s the second driver that people are interested in and then the third one, which is the least motivating to companies is to secure goods in the supply chain for anti-terrorism. They see that as something that if the government mandates it they would do it. Or some of the companies are working in conjunction with the government to do it. But their feeling is that if they do it alone and they take on a huge additional cost, then they are at a comparative disadvantage. So its’s very difficult for one company to deal with security or anti terrorism use of RFDI.

Q. So then for the govt. through it’s agencies like the FDA to push this technology forward and to do testing in some sense is a benefit or a boon to corporations who would like to see that technology help their bottom line. A. Absolutely – I think that there is a huge opportunity here for businesses and the govt to achieve a more secure global supply chain and a more efficient global supply chain. It takes vision for people to see that and to understand that. I do think that govt agencies, the dept of transportation security administration – the FAA with security at the airports, do have that vision and companies are beginning to get that vision and beginning to work together to achieve that goal.

You’re listening to a special report on RFID technology, from a recent intimate conference of industry and corporate officials in Long Beach. Also present at the conference was a representative of the Target corporation. Target is one of several corporations to immediately cooperate with the US government’s post-9-11 anti-terrorism efforts. Caroline Landwehr of Target describes how Target has been testing RFID tags on household ornamental items from their store.

Caroline Landwehr: We used the MATRIC tags here – these were household ornamental items – they were metal. What we did is that we also put the barcode with the actual RFID tags. So it’s important to know that through these tests we were running parallel with our day to day operations until we know more. And we will continue to run them in parallel before we’ll start using RFID in our day to day operations. This was the manufacturer that we used in Manila in the Philippines.

Government/corporate collaboration on pushing RFID technology was most prominently seen in this year’s announcement by the US Food and Drug Agency to require RFID tagging of prescription drugs. Dr. Robin Koh from MIT explains:

Robin Koh: This was the entry document into the US. On Feb 18th this year, 2004, this document came out on what their perspectives on combating counterfeit drugs would be. There was a major announcement – at that time, Commissioner McClellan and Tommy Thompson outlined to the entire pharmaceutical community what their perspectives on trying to contain the counterfeit drugs and supply chain integrity issue was going to be. In 2004 this year, they wanted the community on all the different levels –t he manufacturers, the distributors, the retail pharmacies and even the hospitals to perform mass serializations and RFID feasibility studies. This was the year where all the orgs were supposed to conceptually understand how this thing was going to work and where it was going to play inside their respective orgs. In 2005, mass serialization was actually separated from RFID – mass serialization was the ability to provide a unique identity to every physical object - you want to be able to differentiate one bottle from the other. RFID was seen as an efficient carrier of mass serialization.

That was Feb 18th;. The community moved along. They decided on Nov 15th to kick it up another notch. The FDA established an internal RFID working group within their own dept, which was supposed to provide guidelines to the industry. To monitor the adoption of RFID within the pharmaceutical industry, identify regulatory issues. The Pfizer Corporation actually announced that they were going to tag all Viagra by 2005. This is one of the most heavily counterfeited products – it’s extremely high value. The Pfizer is going to proceed with converting an entire product line on to this technology for all goods sold within the US. Purdue pharmaceutical which makes a highly addictive drug called Oxycotin with comply with their 100 tablet bottle packages also within the next year. And the Glaxo-SmithKline Corporation has committed to convert at least one product onto this system within the next 12-18 months.

Dr. Robin Koh of MIT - describing how the US government, through the US FDA is requiring prescription drugs to be tracked using RFID technology.

But that’s not all. Parts of the US public education system have begun tracking students through the use of RFID technology. The Spring Independent School District in Texas has begun testing RFID chips in ID cards carried by 28,000 students. Jim Thomas, Director of the Electronics Systems Group at Coleman Technologies in Orlando. Florida describes a school in Florida that looking into tracking school kids:

Jim Thomas: They want to monitor kids getting to and from school. So that might be from the point of where they’re picked up on the morning onto the bus. So how do you measure the kid getting on the bus? RFID could be a good solution to that. And then where he gets off the bus – so you can know where the kid is getting on and off. What time he was supposed to be delivered and so that way when mom calls and says Billy didn’t make it home or get off the bus – they possibly could contact the school system and the school would have instant access and tell the mother that bill got off at this stop instead of where he was supposed to get off, and could tell her what time he got off.

Q. that would involve putting RFID tags where? A. In Florida it’s mandated that kids have to have school IDs which are cars like drivers license. So this RFID might be embedded in their school id. It might be that the school mandates it’s worn in a bracelet or in a book some mechanism to carry that book with them everyday.

Q. Why would the school be interested in keeping tabs on kids. A> I’m just guessing – A. you’re providing a level security and you know when your kids are getting off the bus and maybe there’s a liability issue there so that they can say this is where he got on and off the bus.

I spoke with Mark Roberti, the editor of RFID Journal on the validity of privacy concerns and what he thought of some privacy advocates wanting clear labeling of RFID tags on consumer goods.

Mark Roberti: Q. Where do you see the future of RFID tags. Some folks I’ve talked to today say the issue of shelf level item tagging is not something they are worried about. But consumer rights orgs are concerned about being able to have the tags on their clothing being read when they pass by a reader and they are calling for a labeling of goods to say this item is tagged with an RFID tag. What do you think of that? A. The industry has accepted that there is labeling requirements that if you do put an EPC tag on anything that you should have a label on it. It’s a requirement – it’s not a legal requirement. But it is a requirement of the organization that issues the code. RFID is years away from being ubiquitous in the store in your local supermarket. There will be some items tagged in the short term – next year we’ll see some tagging of CDs and DVDs and items that are high value that are stolen. Not very many to items will be tagged at this point because the tags are very expensive. We’re talking about getting down to a 5c tag and everyone thinks that’s’ impossible but you won’t put a 5c tag on a box of cereal – we’ll put a 1c cent on a box of cereals. So we’re a long way away from that. I do understand that there are concerns from privacy advocates on this. The simple answer is if consumers don’t want it, companies won’t do it.

Q. You said companies are a long way from doing shelf-level item tagging but I was reading that the SF Public library was pursing an RFID project and the ACLU was responding to that. It seems as though we are closer to that sort of thing. A. Well libraries are a different thing – because a library book is not bought and then consumed and thrown away – it’s reused so that tag is put on for the life of the book. So that is a different item. IT has great benefits for the library to manage their inventory. It makes life much easier for them.

Q. What I think about is Homeland Security and the USA Patriot ACT with the FBI asking librarians to keep tabs on what people are reading – librarians said they wouldn’t do that – but if every book is tagged with information on who has checked it out, when they checked it out, how long they had it. What are the implications? A. That’s an interesting question = it doesn’t matter how you collect the data but what you do with that data. So the issue is not whether they get that information from an RFID tag in the book or from a bar code in the book or some other way. It’s what you do with that data that is so critical. You can easily design a system that has an RFID tag in it that doesn’t record permanently who checks out the books. You can still identify the book and manage it through your inventory without tracking people. It’s not how you collect data but what you do with the data that’s critical. That’s why, to me, a lot of the privacy folks are barking up the wrong tree because they’re focusing on how you collect the data as opposed to how you collect the data.

Q. So what would your advice be to them? A. my advice would be to push for stronger laws to require disclosure on how information is being gather, what’s being gathered, how it’s being used. The fair information practices are well known and well accepted and they should be – it would be good for it to be codified so that people would be confident that whatever data is being collected through RFID is being protected under the law and cannot be abused or misused.

Q. What about the Verichip? What is it? A. The Verichip is a small RFID tag that can be injected under the skin. It’s been used in animals for a long time – it’s been used in cattle and also used in pets – I think it’s a great application for animals – I don’t its very good for people. Q. But wasn’t it approved by a government agency recently? A. What was said what that it can be implanted and there is no medical harm that they can see –it has no proven value, no medical value no other value other than the fact that if you want to get this, you can get it.

Q. So it has surveillance value though? A. I don’t think it has any surveillance value whatsoever. Q. Well, if it has surveillance value for animals, why not for humans? A. It doesn’t have any surveillance value for animals – it has identification value for animals. When you identify something at close range that’s different than doing surveillance where you are tacking someone wherever they go. So the value is that if I were in an accident someone could scan this chip and go up to a database and get information on me. The problem is that you have to have one global database or one national database. So if I’m traveling out of town and I get hit by a car someone can go in and get my information. If the state I’m in doesn’t use the same database as the state the chip was put it, then there is no value in that chip at all. In my mind there is limited business value and limited medical value and I’d rather wear a pendant around my neck.

Q. Somebody earlier said that he sees the future of this as every item on the planet will be tagged by RFID. Do you see that sort of future and if so, how do you stop the misuse of information when there’s going to be so much information floating around? A. I think you stop the misuse of information by making regulations and laws if necessary. But frankly there is a market mechanism here. What we’ve seen already was that Benetton wanted to put RFID tags in clothes. People objected and they dropped the plan. Companies don’t do what their customers don’t want them to do. So if people don’t want this it won’t happen. Q. So they listened to the privacy advocates in the end. A. They did absolutely = the privacy advocates had a big impact on policy and today a lot of people are taking these issues a lot more seriously. They recognize that the privacy advocates speak for a considerable portion of the population and therefore I don’t want to lose those people as my customers. Q. So maybe they’re not barking up the wrong tree after all? A. It depends on the way you look at it. If you say they’ve done some good and made the industry aware of these issues then yes they’ve done the right thing. My comment about barking up the wrong tree - If you say RFID is bad – stop RFID which is what they are saying – I think that’s a horrible idea because you’re not going to get all the benefits that RFID has to deliver. If you say control the information but allow the tags to be put in products sp that wee can get the benefit of that then you can get the benefits without the negatives. What they are saying, “lets not have the benefits – we don’t want the negatives so let’s not have the benefits either.

One of the potential negatives of RFID technology is the ability for the government and corporations to keep track of workers in the name of counter-terrorism. Mark Roberti gives an example:

Mark Roberti: One of the tests that the transportation security associations is doing is to give drivers of haz mat stuff a biometric RFID card so that you activate your card and then you read it remotely as you enter a facility so that now we know that the driver is who is he supposed to be and they haven’t kidnapped the guy and now they’re going to kill him and drive the truck into a building or something.

Q. One of the things that I heard today that I wanted to know about was a biometric RFID tag. Can you explain that? A. Sure – RFID is basically a micro chip that stores some data and communicates that data via radio waves so what people have done is that they have combined biometrics with RFID where for example the TSA is experimenting with some cards where you have to put your finger print on the card and verify that you’re the right person and then the RFID part of it will work and then it will send the information to a reader. So there are different ways of doing it – you can store someone’s iris scan on an RFID tag – you can store their fingerprint – you can store other things – and this is a way of authenticating that the person using the card is actually who they say they are. So if I wanted to get into a building – I have to verify that I am the person who is supposed to own this card before I swipe it.

RFID will also enable corporations to monitor their workforce and conduct surveillance in the name of increased productivity. Sean Dettloff of Starbucks Corporation explains how Starbucks plans to monitor its workforce :

Sean Dettloff: We really envisioned potentially an RFID license plate signature which says, hi I’m Sean from XYZ milk company and I’m here to drop off your milk. And the store says, yup you’re supposed to be here – lets him in, turns off the alarm system – allows for us to accurately inventory what they are depositing at the store and that they are not walking out with an espresso machine every time they deliver milk to us.

Sean Dettloff: We’ve shown through adoption of technology and trying to influence human behavior at our store level that we can be successful and I think this is a great model to use because I think it applies to RFID.

Monitoring workers is not just being done domestically at the store level, or even limited to RFID methods. Sean Dettloff explains how Starbucks has implemented monitoring of the coffee mills they buy coffee from in Guatemala.

Sean Dettloff: we basically monitored the stuffing of the container and we had video monitoring for the stuffing –we were a little concerned about whether a CC TV camera in this environment will work – will it be appropriate – will they know what to do with it? It turns out they thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It now allows the managers to work upstairs in their office and also watch the loading process and from a productivity issue – it was a huge windfall.

Sean also explains how useful it is for Starbucks to be able to work in another environment unfettered by pesky things like labor laws:

Sean Dettloff: I’ll explain the picture here – one of our loaders – who has about 450 pounds on his back – he’s probably about 5 foot 4, maybe a 100 pounds and was showing off for us during the OSC audit. Umm.. 150 pounds per bag and he’s maybe a 100 pounds himself. [from the audience] is there an OSHA violation there? [Sean] Not in Guatemala! [audience] not in Guatemala. [Sean] yeah, and he’s probably not wearing shoes that’s the other thing you should know.

Mark Roberti of RFID Journal gives his take on the impact of RFID on labor:

Mark Roberti: It has huge implications for workplace issues particularly in the long term. But in the short term, there are issues with tracking workers and their productively – in some cases for security purposes. For example, BP has been experimenting with using RFID tags to track people within a secure facility or within an oil producing facility. So if someone is not authorized to be in a certain place or if someone doesn’t have the training to operate certain machinery the RFID reader would read their tag, know that they are not supposed to be doing what they are doing and then send an alert so that they would stop doing that. So there are some protections for the worker which are good. And there are some things where potentially you would want to secure goods in a supply chain and you might be tracking workers to see who is near high value products when they disappear so there is an element of oversight that is no doubt going to make some workers uncomfortable with the technology.

You’re listening to a special report on RFID technology, from a recent conference of industry and corporate officials in Long Beach. An FBI representative was invited to speak about the topic of “What’s in RFID for Law Enforcement”? But nobody from FBI showed up to speak. Jim Thomas from Coleman Technologies was one of the attendees whose goal was to incorporate RFID technology into his work of making covert tracking devices for law enforcement. I asked him to describe his company’s products:

Jim Thomas: A. Network solutions as well as vehicle location type systems for commercial and govt applications.

Q. What does it mean vehicle location? A. For determining the location of a vehicle based on the driver map location where the end user can basically see where the driver has driven or is driving.

Q. And what use is that? A. Both in the commercial world – its’ for tracking your fleet – you want to know where your load is or where your vehicle is and you might have a guy who is carpet cleaning and you want ot know where your trucks are where your fleet is, and you want to know how much time her spent at a particular stop. In the law enforcement world you can track anything from bad guys maybe in the drug oriented world or suspected people that have done things where you might want to know what their behavior is or where they are going.

Q. Currently what level is the technology at? Maybe can you describe for example how the products use GPS technology? A. GOS is a terrestrial navigation system that can place you anywhere in the world. So from satellites above the earth we can pin point any position and use that to locate you and to guide you where you want to go. So if you’re trying to get somewhere we can use GPS in navigating to a particular point or tracking someone. The technology is used from one end of the spectrum to the next. It’s amazing what it can be used for.

Jim Thomas: Q. What is the level of surveillance that law enforcement can use today for say, suspected criminals? A. Well, there are laws that regulate when they can install something like some covert GPS device on a vehicle. It requires court orders based on different criteria that they have to meet. They just can’t go tracking anybody for any particular reason – that’s not allowed. But once they get court orders or approval or suspected – they have – I don’t want to say jump through the hurdles – but done the appropriate things that they are supposed to do - then law enforcement needs a tool and we provide a tool that can provide them this covert GPS device that can be placed on a vehicle. And that gives them real time tracking of the vehicle. It doesn’t tell them who is in the car. It just tells you where the car is going.

Q. Tell me more – it’s a covert GPS tracker so a police officer can stop a suspected criminal, say your light is broken and plant a GPS tracker and then see what happens? A. It’s not quite that easy – you hope it would be – it’s not the James Bond little round thing that you just stick up under the gas tank and it has a blinking red light and it drives down the road. But they are small – I won’t tell you how small. The normal street law enforcement guy you see driving around is not the guy who is doing this – these are covert undercover type law enforcement officials that are doing it –t he people that are working the drug prevention – going after our drug pins and the guys providing our drugs to the kids and to the market today. So we’re not after the guy driving down the street. But he could be a suspect and if he they have mechanisms in place to get one of these on his car.

Q. What is your opinion of complaints of consumer groups who feel that RFID technology is an invasion of their privacy and could herald a world of Big Brother is watching you at all time? A. As an engineer and a consumer my self, they’re right. It could be – RFID is a great tool, if it’s used properly but in my opinion it could be an invasion of privacy – this is coming from a guy who builds covert GPS stuff. Because there’s no mechanism in place that I know of that allows it to be turned on and off. And I don’t want to be measured as you’re using something or not using something based on someone driving down the street and potentially interrogate my house. And tell that I am using a product – if everything has an RFID tag on it in the end then maybe someday that will be done. Today’s it’s not and thank god it’s not. But the real purpose of RFID tag is to measure the product and know that it’s getting to the store and they use it all the time on material coming out of stores. If you didn’t buy it , you can’t take it out of the store – the alarm goes off. But I can see just like there’s hackers on the internet to hack your credit card information and everything about you. There will be the same type pf people in the RFID work that will try to hack your personal information and your personal druthers on what products you buy.

You’ve been listening to a special report on Radio Frequency Identification Technology, from a conference that was recently held in Long Beach by the National Cargo Security Council. It seems as though there’s no going back on RFID technology. Privacy advocates continue their battle against corporate and government pressures to use RFID tags on everything on the planet. Ultimately its up to you – the members of the public to ensure that RFID and the flood of information it will make available, is managed wisely. For Uprising, I’m Sonali Kolhatkar.