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Department of Homeland Security looking to develop super-RFID tags?

A rather alarmist new book on RFID tagging has recently hit store shelves (you can pretty much guess the authors' position on tagging from the title of the book- "Spychips") which claims to have uncovered a "plot" by the Department of Homeland security to invent a more precise flavor of chip for remote tracking of individuals. Privacy advocates and Spychips authors Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre say they have discovered a Request for Information issued by the DHS calling for "significant improvements in performance" over the current tech with respect to "superior remote data capture." Specifically, the document supposedly calls for a solution that can identify individual people sitting among others in a car or bus, without any special action on the part of the surveyed, at distances up to 25-feet. Instead of jumping through all these hoops to come up with an invasive yet implausible technology (lead passport wallets, anyone?), it would seem a lot easier for the government to just pass a law confining us all to our homes, turning the whole "tracking" thing into a non-issue.

[Via The Wireless Report]