Skeptic Project

They laughed when John Birch Society and Pat Robertson said the UPC tags would be used to control us, well, now they're everywhere! I can't even buy an item without one on it! Oh my god, the anti-christ is here!

Technology is used because it's good technology. RFID does its job well, but most people who fear them tend to believe in the Christian/Evangelical version of the end times and that there's a connection. Long after RFID is obsolete, whatever new technology comes out, guaranteed the anti-christ will be using that any day.

When it comes to technology to fear, I find bullets to be far more frightening and controlling than any RFID chip.

Oh noes! Those invisible lasers!
They will give you cancer, that's what David Icke says!

Ed, what I don't understand is how all these non-Christian CT's can't see that half of the conspiracy theories out there have Christian overtones to them. Its mind boggling.

"microchips floating around inside us absorbing even more ELF "

What does ELF stand for? I guess I wouldn't be surprised if he actually believed their were little elves inside of us that the microchips would go about absorbing... but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

I remember when large RFID tags were put in the ears of cattle (I worked on a farm briefly) they were for tracking the entity and livestock management and were tied into the computer programs I was working on. They could only be read about a foot away by a handheld reader.

I would imagine RFID's in commercial items now hold the same properties; stock management and to some degree, anti-theft.

Most of these RFID's are still passive, in that they need a close proximity reader but a lot of people are scared that they can be developed as active with their own power source and transmitters to be able to track humans, or simply put in the skin as passive and then create scanner infrastructure to read them at various checkpoints.

There have been some downsides to some RFID chips if the wrong people get drive-by scanners and read data from the chips. A TV program I watched once had a demonstration of people reading the encrypted data as they drove past in a car, then transfering it to a machine to be able to brute force it.

In either case, I know what passive RFID's do and don't really want to be treated like cattle so I probably wont get one in my skin if any scanners are going to be put around the place.

@DisordeR

Precisely they are low range emmissions that require reciever technology to be within close proximity, often millimetres and upto metres, usually not very far due to the fact the signal obeys the inverse square law and reduces its power as its distance doubles from source.

People who talk about these RFID chips claim them to be different to normal RFID chips, but they can never supply you with the emmission distances or the technical specifications of them that make them different. So basically they are going with the premise that these chips are super technology that can be read from miles of the person [they usually use the claim about satellites reading from space as a validation its possible], but this is erroneous because its completely different technology.

Bottom line is they are panicking about a technology they cant even provide technical details of.

Noone would get one implanted to be tracked if there was a reciever network in place to montior your everyday whereabouts this is understandable, but when you consider the world is full of paranoid people who are scared of mice you can see why people would put them on their kids and valuable property. Not that I am justifying using them, but I understand why people are doing it, they are buying into the paranoia society breeds.