Thursday, December 28, 2006

CCC Pulls RFID Into the Sunlight

This makes me think of a quote from Tomhiko Taniguchi, Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman.

"Sunshine is the best disinfectant..."

Basically, he is saying that sweeping something under the rug isn't going to fix anything. Bring an issue to the front and be transparent about it. So instead of just talking about RFID, the CCC is using it...and forcing those in attendence to pay attention.

Via Wired -

BERLIN -- This year's Chaos Communication Congress opens with a unique opportunity -- your chance to track the movements of a Wired News' reporter on the scene, as well as nearly a thousand other visitors to the annual hacker convention.

Hackers are paying 10 euros each for the privilege of hanging special homebrew RFID tags around their necks or slapping them on their laptop bags. Every few seconds, each of these "CCC Sputnik" badges reports its owner's position to an array of 35 monitoring stations, and spits out the guinea-pigs' every move over a public XML feed.

Why is the CCC, a venue more commonly associated with RFID cracks and spychip destruction devices, supporting such an invasion of its members' privacy? One of the project's leaders, Milosch Meriac, explains the motivation to create the system was to make obvious what is normally hidden in how our technology tracks us.

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