Bilderberg.org

[willow the wip]

Hi with in this past week i will be uploading the documentry on the RFID microchips and with this you can make puchases.

The new cash

also check out my new photo of what the passports have


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Christ over Christianity.

[willow the wip]

Is business the real Big Brother?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5015826.stm

Monitoring and surveillance of employees and customers by big business is now commonplace.



It's increasingly a feature of our daily lives, because businesses have found that it makes good business sense. But is corporate snooping out of control?

In Britain, we are all familiar with the CCTV cameras that have sprung up across our city centres and transport networks.

We generally accept that they are there to counter crime and help monitor traffic flows on our busy roads.

But how many of us realise that when we travel about, each of us is captured, on average, 300 times a day on CCTV, and should we be concerned?

Of course, if we look up, we can see the CCTV cameras. We know they're there.

But are they just the visible tip of a much larger and more deep-rooted surveillance society?

'Surveillance capital'

Dr Kirstie Ball of the Open University certainly thinks so. She believes that most of the surveillance and monitoring of our movements is hidden.

"It's everywhere, absolutely everywhere," she says.

"As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we've been doing."

She is far from being alone in this view. "In Britain, we are saturated in a world of surveillance," says Simon Davies, director of Privacy International and a fellow of the London School of Economics.



"Britain has to be the surveillance capital of the Western world."

For most of us, surveillance conjures up images of spies in trenchcoats standing in the rain on gloomy street corners, and of Big Brother government telling us how we should think and behave.

But the kind of surveillance that worries privacy campaigners today concerns us as customers of big business. Customers are constantly monitored and tracked, mostly without realising it.

Secret devices

Take the Oyster card, for example, which millions of us use each day to pay for our journeys when travelling on London's tubes and buses. Not only do the cards record payment, but they can also track travellers' journeys across the city.

At the RAC's national breakdown centre, callers can be accurately located within seconds, thanks to the signals transmitted by their mobile phones.

An RAC patrolman reveals that many hire cars are now fitted with secret tracking devices, allowing rental companies to follow the movements of their customers.

"It used to be that surveillance was a bolt-on feature of society," says Mr Davies. "Now surveillance is part of the infrastructure. It's a design component."

For business, monitoring can mean greater efficiency in the work place. Bosses can see what is happening in real time and thereby identify what can be improved - or even, if they choose to, which employees are doing their job well and which ones are not.

A prime example of the highly-monitored work place is the call centre, where sophisticated software is used to log and analyse every second of agents' working lives.

Rufus Grig - who runs Callmedia, a company that makes computer software for call centre operations - explains to the Money Programme the extent of workplace monitoring. The call centre, he says, "can be a terrifically highly-monitored environment".

Efficiency check

In the warehouse operations that supply products to shops and supermarkets, more and more workers are required to wear computers which instruct them on the tasks they need to perform, as well as monitoring and recording every step they take.

Wincanton, one of Britain's biggest logistics companies, uses computer technology in many of its big distribution centres across Britain.



The firm has found that if properly used, the technology can bring big benefits for the company and workforce. But this has not been the experience everywhere.

Eddie Gaudie, from the GMB union, explains that some businesses closely monitor the productivity of their workers all day long.

He says: "At any time of the day, it's monitored down to the last minute, even in seconds."

Companies insist that these tracking technologies help to boost efficiency and cut costs, which is all to the customers' benefit.

"You can buy this argument that this is all for our own good," says Mr Davies. "I don't. Because what I believe about surveillance is that ultimately it is used against individuals, not for them."

No privacy

One new technology could mean there will soon be nowhere to hide for any of us. The big high street retailers are experimenting with putting tiny computer chips in their merchandise.

These chips are called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Potentially, they could be used to track the products and the people who buy them, out of the shops and into their homes.



One day, RFID chips could be on everything we buy, and it may not stop there.

Similar chips are also being implanted in patients in American hospitals, to act as minute ID cards and to track them through the medical system.

A world where everything and everybody can be tracked at any time, day or night, is a prospect which fills some observers with horror.

"You won't be able to hide from the system by closing your door or closing your curtains or hiding behind a wall," says privacy campaigner Christopher McDermott.

"The X-ray eyes of the state and of big corporates will be able to see through those, and will be able to see right into your very personal and private life."

Has business become the real Big Brother?

The Money Programme: The Real Big Brother, BBC Two at 7pm on Friday 26 May.

will post the videos soon.
_________________
Christ over Christianity.

[Johnny Meadows]

Yes, the new Irish passports have RFID chips added to them. It was introduced by Dermot Ahern a few months ago and there was a picture on the front cover of the Irish Times. I'll see if I can source that article for you.

[willow the wip]

that would be great if you could
_________________
Christ over Christianity.

[Johnny Meadows]

Here's that gobshite who sold our freedoms here in Ireland a year ago:

http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/1016/passports.html?rss

"Dermot Ahern launches new E-passport"
Monday, 16 October 2006 20:05

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, has launched the E-passport, 10 days ahead of schedule and within budget. From today, all Irish passports will be issued in bio-metric form. The E-Passport contains an embedded microchip which stores the passport's information and makes it virtually impossible to forge. People can still use their regular passport but their next passport will be an E-passport.

Ten years from today all passports will be bio-metric. To mark today's launch, Minister Ahern presented a group of people, randomly selected from around the country, with a new E-Passport.


And here's some more:

http://www.theregister.com/2006/10/23/smart_chips_for_smart_crooks/

Irish passports go RFID, and naked
Mug me, my house is currently worth a fortune
By Thomas C Greene in Dublin

Published Monday 23rd October 2006 13:45 GMT

Analysis:

The Irish government has begun issuing RFID passports with biometric data that can be read at a distance to comply with US regulations for its visa waiver programme. But unlike the RFID passports the USA is now issuing, the Irish ones lack a security feature preventing them from being skimmed, or read surreptitiously.

The US government has gone to the trouble of fitting its passports with a layer of foil that interferes with skimming attempts when the document is closed. The Irish government has not. A local lobbying outfit called Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) has complained that the new passports are ripe for remote privacy invasion. As of course they are.

Unfortunately, DRI has taken that a step further, fretting in a recent interview with the Sunday Times that the unprotected passports could leave Irish travelers "open to targeting by terrorists". We find that to be quite a stretch, since Ireland remains neutral in the GWOT. While we wouldn't expect a terrorist attack to be called off because Irish citizens might become casualties, we're fairly confident they would be among the last people actively targeted.

But forgetting terrorists for a moment (not easy, we know, with everyone and his brother playing that card), there are significant privacy issues attached to carrying a document that broadcasts your name, nationality, date of birth, digital photo, fingerprint(s), tax number, and sundry other tidbits either in the system now, or scheduled to be added in the future.

Meanwhile, identity thieves have exhibited miraculous powers of imagination and Herculean initiative in exploiting the simplest holes in data security. This passport, while not an open book today, will likely become one long before its many holes are patched. A simple layer of foil in the cover would help, although it's hardly a privacy panacea. Recent tests have shown that the RFID chips can be cloned. It's also been found possible to read an unprotected chip from as far away as 30 feet. And it has been demonstrated that RFID systems are vulnerable to viruses.

This is merely the start of a string of vulnerabilities we can expect to hear about, and the system is only now getting underway. Some of the best ones might not be discovered by researchers, but might instead be exploited by criminals for quite some time, until they're finally discovered and a fix is found. Furthermore, passports are often used as ID cards, not merely as travel documents. The potential for skimming in that situation is virtually unlimited.

The whole scheme is meant to prevent people flying on fraudulent passports. And indeed, if it weren't for the cloning potential, this would be a help, although not a comprehensive fix. It is still quite easy to get an authentic passport with phony documents. I got one with nothing more than a birth certificate, a picture ID, and an application on which my signature had been witnessed by a notary public.

I was asked to swear that the information on the application was accurate, which I did. Perhaps I might have flinched if I'd been lying, but I doubt many criminals would. With that, I received the passport in less than 24 hours. I think it unlikely that the authenticity of the birth certificate, the picture ID, and the notary public's stamp could have been verified in that time, unless I'd been the passport office's only customer. Most likely, if any verification is done, it's done on a fraction of the applications.

The RFID/biometric component has been grossly oversold as an authenticity panacea. It's hi-tech, scientific and all that, so it impresses the man in the street, who now feels that international criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists will have a harder time operating. But this scheme might actually make life easier for them, since the overall perception of the biometric passport is one of enhanced security and sophistication. Which means that a bogus one will be even more convincing than it should be, and less likely to be challenged.

Besides not addressing the issue of authenticity terribly well, from a privacy point of view, RFID is the worst possible technology. But it seemed so next-generation to State Department bureaucrats, it was irresistible. A less fancy chip that can be read only through contact, such as those deployed on some credit cards, would be far more secure in terms of privacy. Of course, a layer of foil in the cover, which the US passports have and the Irish ones lack, will at least be helpful in this regard.

This scheme may yet prove to be a terribly expensive blunder. While no one has yet demonstrated a technique for tampering with the data on an RFID chip, we can certainly expect one to surface. Probably long before the first generation of super passports will have expired, prompting - well, what? A mass, international passport recall? Who will pay for that? And how will passport offices manage to replace millions of defective passports while still issuing new ones in a reasonable period of time? Or will we just live with the fact that many millions of passports are unreliable?

RFID isn't going to fix the problem that it's intended to fix, that is, the proliferation of bogus travel documents, yet it will become a boon to identity thieves. Basically, it's a bit worse than what we had. But it is hi-tech, scientific, and all that. Which, for the US State Department, is enough. ®

[Johnny Meadows]

Here's some more articles which should help:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6182207.stm

ePassports 'at risk' from cloning

By David Reid
Reporter, BBC Click

Iridian passport reader
US wants visitors to have machine-readable passports

The ePassport is one of the many measures pursued by the United States and governments internationally after the horror of 11 September. It will, we are promised, keep the unwanted and dangerous outside our borders, while streamlining entry for those welcome to come and visit. But as the implementation of the scheme gets underway it is becoming clear that there could be serious problems with it. With the old passport, we knew where we stood. If you lost it you knew you had lost it, but with the new, machine readable passports the story is very different. When you take a digital photo the image is, in effect, a code, which means that however many prints you make they are all exactly the same.

Five-minute replica:

So when Lukas Grunwald and Christian Bottger realised they could clone the new ePassport they were pretty sure it would be identical to the original, and undetectable. So how did they do it? The chip inside the ePassport is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip of the type poised to replace the barcode in supermarkets.

[A new British biometric European Union passport, which is embedded with a microchip]

The 'enhanced' security features of ePassports are being questioned. The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader. But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay. Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo. Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip. Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.

Security risks:

When the cloned ePassport is read and compared to the original one it behaves exactly the same. The UK Home Office however dismissed the ability to get hold of the information on the chip. A spokesman said: "It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip. "Other than the photograph, which could be obtained easily by other means, they would gain no information that they did not already have - so the whole exercise would be pointless: the only information stored on the ePassport chip is the basic information you can see on the personal details page."

The spokesman said the chip was one part of the security features of the ePassport. He said: "Being able to copy this does not mean that the passport can be forged or imitated for illegal or unauthorised use. "British ePassports are designed in such a way as to make chip substitution virtually impossible and the security features of the passport render the forgery of the complete document impractical."

According to Lukas Grunwald of the consulting company DN-Systems an ePassport holder is more at risk from someone trying to steal their data. "Nearly every country issuing this passport has a few security experts who are yelling at the top of their lungs and trying to shout out: 'This is not secure. This is not a good idea to use this technology'". DN-Systems' Christian Böttger also believes the system was set up in a hurry. "It is much too complicated. It is in places done the wrong way round - reading data first, parsing data, interpreting data, then verifying whether it is right. "There are lots of technical flaws in it and there are things that have just been forgotten, so it is basically not doing what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to get a higher security level. It is not," he said.

Danger:

A European Union funded network of IT security experts has also come out against the ePassport scheme. It is almost like writing your pin number on the back of your cashpoint card. Researchers working within the Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) network say European governments have forced a document on its citizens that dramatically decreases security and increases the risk of identity theft. RFID chips can be read at a short distance and tracked without their owner's knowledge, while the key to unlocking the passport's chip consists of details actually printed on the passport itself. It is almost like writing your pin number on the back of your cashpoint card.

"The basic access control mechanism works based on information like the number of the passport, the name of the passport holder, the date of birth and then other data which are simply readable by anyone who looks on the passport," said Professor Kai Rannenberg of Frankfurt University. "If you have that information and put the respective software into the reader, the reader can overcome the basic access control of the passport." The experts say it is not too late to roll back and rethink the ePassport.

If not, the danger is obvious - that a scheme, the declared aim of which is to increase our security, could well do the exact opposite.


Don't know if you guys have seen this one:

http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/06/daily_mail_passport_clone/

How to clone a biometric passport while it's still in the bag
Mail exposes the postal vulnerability
By John Lettice
Published Tuesday 6th March 2007 11:20 GMT

In an investigation for the Daily Mail, security consultant Adam Laurie has demonstrated how a new UK biometric passport can be cloned without even being removed from its delivery envelope.

The Mail exploit draws on previous work by Laurie and others, and puts together vulnerabilities in the chip technology, and in the chip security and logistics systems used by the Identity & Passport Service.
Click here to find out more!

The data in the chip is essentially a digital version of what is printed inside the passport itself. The printed data can be read if the passport is presented and opened, and the chip's security system attempts to duplicate this process. The chip data can be read wirelessly, but it is encrypted, with the key printed inside the passport. So in theory, although the chip can be read without the passport (or indeed the delivery envelope) being opened, the data is meaningless without the key.

But the key in this first generation of biometric passport is relatively easy to identify/crack. It is not random, but consists of passport number, the passport holder's date of birth and the passport expiry date. The Mail found it relatively easy to identify the holder's date of birth, while the expiry date is 10 years from the issue date, which for a newly-delivered passport would clearly fall within a few days. The passport number consists of a number of predictable elements, including an identifier for the issuing office, so effectively a significant part of the key can be reconstructed from the envelope and its address label.

Laurie established the theory of this last year, but the Mail report puts it into practice. With the cooperation of the applicant, the newly-delivered passport envelope was rerouted, and a working key was identified within four hours. Once this has been done, a fraudster would have all of the information needed to copy the chip, and therefore would be some considerable distance closer to being able to produce an identical copy of the entire passport.

The Mail notes that no proof of identity was required when the passport was delivered, but the vulnerabilities exposed mean that the problem goes far beyond the occasional passport being cloned after its delivery has been intercepted. Because it's feasible to steal the data without detection, it's perfectly possible that insiders could intercept large numbers of the millions of new passports delivered every year.

If, that is, there is a point to doing so. At the moment the value of the data is limited because the chip can only be copied, not changed, so it can only be used as an aid in the forgery of a copy of an existing passport (although some possible exploits based on this are described here). Passport forgers would still have to produce a viable copy of the passport book itself, and the resulting document could only be used by someone of similar appearance to the original owner.

That, however, is the current state of play, not necessarily the end of the story. One of the primary reasons the chip is being introduced is because historically, passport forgers have been able to forge successive generations of book passports, with each new iteration of security eventually being matched by the bad guys.

Once biometric passports are commonplace the forgers will need to be able to deal with the chips in them, and if they want to stay in business they'll need to be able to change the data, not just copy it.

Without access to the digital signature used by the passport issuing authority to protect the integrity of the data, this can't be done. The forgers could therefore attempt to crack the signature for the passport variety of their choice, but simply gaining access to the key via corrupt officials or espionage could turn out to be a quicker route. With this in mind, it's worth noting that ICAO, which devised the system, anticipates that keys will be compromised, and puts forward steps that should be taken to protect the system when this happens.

If, however, this turns out to happen a lot (how many of the world's passport issuing authorities would you trust?), then chip security will quite possible turn out to be just one more increment in the passport forgery arms race. ®

[illuminat]

Hi

I work in a hospital in Germany as a Nurse and we have RFID chips in our clothes.VERY practical to pick it up from the machine and so on---they tell us.When i talked to the clothing people about the controlling features and what you could do with it she looked at me like i was El Quaida personally

She didnt like it at all that i started a disskussion about RFID in front of 10 other Kolleges

Well allways the same.

People have a tremendous lack of knowledge and most even love to live in ignorance--they dont WANT to know

[MrGinger]

Questions

How can you detect one of these chips if it is hidden ?

How can you disable one of these chips ?

I would like to be able to detect any of these chips if they are hidden. Would an EMF or Gauss Meter detect one of these chips . . I doubt it because it just would not produce a strong enough signal.

While obviously getting the litte bugger to swallow a bit of mains voltage would fry the chip, it would also be obvious the chip has been sabotaged. Not something you want to explain to customs, anyone know the limits of these chips, is it 5V, or more ?

We need to learn now, before asking such questions labels you as a terrorist.
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Serious questions about the Occult - pm me.