Welcome to the Third Eye on watchmojo.com, the program where we watch the watchers. Now, if you’re going to take someone on, the first rule is to know your enemy. So, if you’re going to watch the watchers, you got to know how they’re watching you. And that’s why today, we’re going to be talking about a technology whose potential absolutely stamps the collective intrusiveness about GPS and close circuit television when it comes to Big Brother surveillance.
We’re talking about RFID, that’s Radio Frequency Identification. Now, it’s a technology that has roots as far back in the 1920s but have come a long way since then. And now, we’re talking about chips that are smaller than a grain of sand. That’s right. Those are technologies that catching on so quick that between the times it first manifested in its current form in the 1960s until 2005, approximately 2.4 billion of these chips were sold. However, the forecasted sales for 2006 alone are 1.3 billion and it’s estimated that by 2015, 13 trillion of these chips would be manufactured.
So, what are these chips and what are they use for? These chip surface are in a variety of forms but they tend to fall into one of two general categories. First of all, there’s the active chip. We’re talking about chips that have their own power supply, have ranges up to a hundred meters, about a 10-year lifespan can be a small as a coin and can monitor everything from temperature, humidity, vibration, light, radiation and even atmospherics but these aren’t the ones we’re worried about. After all, they are the size of a coin. They’re easy to spot. But once they post the biggest threats, your privacy are the passive chips. They have no power supply of their own. However, they’re thinner than a piece of paper and could be as small as .15 mm x .15 mm. We’re talking about the size of a flake of pepper. There is chip as five cents each and they have a range ranging anywhere from 10cm to few meters and in unlimited lifespan. And Even scarier where are these chips going? They’re going into the world of polymer semiconductors. What does that mean? Well, I’m not quite sure but it basically boils down to this. These chips are going to be able to be manufactured on a row of print basis. We’re talking about the same way they print magazines and newspaper and we’re still assuming these chips are going to be cheaper than a sheet of newspapers making them virtually free until they’re replacing the bar code and any other similar form of product identification.
Now, why are they so dangerous if they don’t have a power supply of their own? Simply put they’re almost indestructible because they don’t have a power supply of their own that’s why they have an unlimited lifespan. And the way they work is that they actually get their power from the signals that they receive from transmitter. So essentially, you have these chips in some product, in your pocket, in your technology. And when they pass a ceratin source of transmission, they pick up that transmission which powers them and sends back a signal. And through this system, they can identify everything from your identity, your location as well as any product specifications or the product that contains the technology.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services