“Watch the skies”
Wired describes the alleged use of RFID (radio frequency identification) devices to track hostile forces in Afghanistan. “Nineteen year-old Habibur Rehman made a videotaped ‘confession’ of planting such devices, just before he was executed by the Taliban as an American spy. ‘I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at Al Qaeda and Taliban houses,’ he said. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.” A link is provided to a Virginia manufacturer which advertises devices suitable for “High-Value Target Tagging Missions” and “intelligence operations”.
What is RFID? Published literature describes it as “a tag made up of a microchip with an antenna, and an interrogator or reader with an antenna. The reader sends out electromagnetic waves. The tag antenna is tuned to receive these waves.” They come in ‘active’ and ‘passive’ varieties. The passive tags require illumination from a reading device and transform it into power to return a signal. Active tags are provided with a battery to broadcast on their own. Some devices use a strategy called “energy harvesting” to store up energy from neary electromagnetic sources until enough is accumulated to send a burst transmission out. A suitable tag can theoretically be read from outer space. “Active RFID tags, which use a battery to broadcast a signal and are used on cargo containers and other large assets, could be read from a satellite if there is little RF “noise” (ambient RF energy that causes interference) and the broadcasted signal is powerful enough. ”
Wired says the hardest part about using the RFID system is getting them onto the right targets. The 19 year old American spy executed by the Taliban was quoted as saying “The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money.” But targeting decisions may rely on multiple sources of data, of which the readouts from RFID tags are just one. In any event, like their logistical counterparts, the tags are probably used to collect information on movement patterns, so that any strike will be within the pattern, thus reducing the probability of misidentification. Used in statistically sufficient quantities, they will probably yield useful information even if the Taliban active sweep themselves for bugs and make it hard for the enemy to employ deception unless they devote significant resources to misdirection.
Perhaps their most important use is to make the Taliban suspicious of any and every piece of equipment that comes their way. Cellular phones, music players, clothes — potentially anything at all — could be a death warrant from America. Wired notes, “ever since 9/11, locals in Central Asia and the Middle East have spread tall tales about American super-technology: soldiers with x-ray glasses, satellites that can see into homes, tanks with magnetic, grenade-repelling armor.” If the effect of RFID tags makes the Taliban suspicious of anything more advanced than a rock, then among other things it creates a philosophical dilemma for them. An ideology which idealizes the 8th century may eventually have to ask itself if it truly wants to live in a universe with nothing complicated enough to betray them.
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“Gnarly dude!”
“Perhaps their most important use is to make the Taliban suspicious of any and every piece of equipment that comes their way.”
Disinformation ops therefore become inexpensive and very potent weapons in our arsenal. If word gets out that goats, for example, are being bred in the U.S. with nano transmitters in their bones, we might be able to starve the Taliban.
Morally Superior
And ruin their sex lives.
Is there no end to the cunning of those Jews?
And to a certain mindset, there isn’t.
ADE
#2. I hear goats have been genetically modified to breed with pigs. Really
The Taliban too engage in disinformation ops, far better than we. *Countless innocent people are being killed!* they howl, and there is a good chance they will be heeded.
“If the effect of RFID tags makes the Taliban suspicious of anything more advanced than a rock,….”
I have a couple of Vietnam-era U.S. military “rocks” – or maybe they are clumps of dirt or even a dried out chunk of do-do. They are intrusion detectors that translate ground vibrations into a signal that can be picked up by warning receivers and used to alert even a platoon sized unit to intruders.
In that era we also had air-dropped “trees” that monitored people nearby.
When the Japanese planned their attacks of 1941 their top engineers and scientists did a “What If” threat assessment. When they evaluated the possibility of U.S. nuclear weapons they concluded that they were 100 years away. When the bomb hit Hiroshima they knew what it was right away, and the fact they were 100 years behind their adversaries was a bigger shock to their scientific people than was the destruction of a city.
Of course, the Japanese are much, much smarter than are the Islamic Fascists.
Every one with a drivers license carries an unique RFID that can be read from a distance.
Some of my jobs had ID cards with RFID’s embedded in them for secure access to restricted areas. They were quite low power, but could be read in my wallet without removing it from my pocket as I approached certain doors. They gave visitors who were unaware of what was in my pocket the “open Sesame” confusion (how’d you do that?).
I assume that I could be identified just by driving past some of the checkpoints in my border state, all they’d need is a higher power detector to know exactly who just drove by. (or at least who’s wallet drove by)
Now our passports have ‘em. I would hope this makes customs and border crossing more convenient. At least for the clerk who will already know who you are before you approach the counter.
Whew!
A safe topic at last. Out of the raging boulder strew narratives about the debates of the 1960-1975 culture wars. What happened to the truce?
There is no right or wrong in the Swat Valley. Each act by itself can be justified. Only when the whole picture of the 19 year old “spy” admitting to tagging anything he can in order to get the payoff does one think the his death is a good riddance. The whole picture is only what fits into the frame. Perspective is the telltale of a narrative.
That is the fallacy of the narrative. They create their own ending. Myths have more uncertainty. They are more resistant to politics.
There is the story of the Taliban. There is the story of rise from a humble background. There is the story of the man of the people.
There is the myth of Jihad. There is the myth of equality. There is the myth of Prometheus. Myths end in eventual ambivalence. They tag us all, not just the target.
Thanks for the halftime break.
So, do we believe his confession? I thought no valid information ever resulted from torture/threats of death.
Meanwhile, back in the states, get ready for RFID in your cars license plate. Speeding? Wait for your ticket to show up on your debit card. Sigh….
CBP sent me a new NEXUS card a few weeks ago. It contains an RFID chip. They also included a stiff paper sleeve with a metallic lining, in which the card is supposed to be stored when not actually crossing the Canada/US border. The instructions say that failure to store the card in the sleeve risks loss of stored information to unauthorized people using scanners.
I have no idea whether sleeves like that actually work.
Oh boy after years of lurking something I can a contribution to! As a microwave Engineer, RFIDs are no mystery. Yes the metal sleeve will not allow the chip to be read from any meaningful distance. Better yet 5 seconds in your microwave will fry the little bugger for good…
Makes you wonder how far away we are from Neal Stephenson’s “toner wars” from The Diamond Age. Probably less than 100 years.
11, 12 –
Similar in principle to this technology?
“Better yet 5 seconds in your microwave will fry the little bugger for good…”
Finally, a microwave engineer that knows how to get something done without wiping of his brow uttering something about insertion losses and S-parameters.
Wow, it is a small world. I was working on an RFID project this morning, for shipping containers. The technology isn’t new. But standardization is relatively new, and that has enabled RFID to be rolled out into the industrial world, and in a very big way.
But still, the number of myths surrounding its use amazes (and sometimes saddens) me. But hey, if the perception of magical properties can be used to our advantage, why not?
Dear Sirs,
I herewith present in full a comment I made on this very blog on Sept. 12, 2008:
Dear Sirs,
This is an interesting subject. So interesting that I went out to the trash bin and retrieved the disposable razor I has discarded this morning. I washed it off, performed the prescribed ceremony proclaiming it Occam’s razor, and used it shave a slice of cheddar. The last didn’t work very well – happens with a lot of my bright ideas.
There is a ubiquitous, well known and well understood technology used for remote sensing – RFID.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
Commercial RFID is just that, commercial. You don’t employ the best technology but only that that meets the requirements at the optimal cost. For only $10 more (plus shipping and handling) you can get better performance.
The question is how do you get it on the guy. The people you are after don’t issue press releases. You find them by penetrating their organizations. You find the neighborhood bad guy and drop a chip in his sweet tea and track where he goes. One step up. Penetrate that organization – there are always some who are in it for the money – you can buy them pretty cheap. More tea. Up the ladder. There are other ways that I wont get into.
Wretchard mentioned the database. RFID’s give you an essentially unlimited unique ID’s. For those of you who know only of relational databases they are other data structures that are for more efficient and much more versatile.
I don’t have any information which would lead me to think that this is what they’re doing. Just sitting around sipping my gin and surfing the web.
Regards,
Roy
2001 space oddessy was done just before nasa discontinued the apollo program. Within a year or so a book came out called Future Shock. That book was set off by the really disorienting shock of seeing guys walking around on the moon.
the alien obelisk’s influence on the ape’s invention goes to atheist origin theories. Biologists these days are seeing whole cities in a single cell and geneticists see what looks altogether like a language when they read the genetic code. for guys looking at this stuff face to face it gets really tough to presume that this stuff came from nothing ex nihilo .
theists say that when you have a design–there must be a designer. They say God is the designer.
Atheists, like Dawkins acknowledge the complexity problem by saying likely earth was seeded by space aliens. Dawkins got this insight from Francis Crick who one of the discoverers of the genetic code.
The problem with the atheists theory is that it only just sets back in time the origins of the germ line. that is even if it were space aliens that seeded the earth–where did they get their biology from?
The dispute between the creationists and the space aliens in organic chemistry maps over pretty well over onto the dispute among physicits and the like as to the origins of the universe where the standard model is the big bang for which there is empirical evidence–and all the other multidimensional models for which there are not. Forty years ago now the idea of a big bang — that something came from nothing ex nihilo –was a big shock. Why? Because it came as a natural scientist confirmation of the book of Genesis–ie “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Atheists tend to like the steady state theory.
For those interested — theology tends to track philosophy/science. philosophy/Science tends to track theology. That is, changes in one tend to correspond with changes in the other–in a broad historical pattern–(and in way that is ineffible.) But they are very different animals. For want of a better way of saying it — theology is top down–God is the measure of all things–whereas philosophy/science is bottoms up as in… Man is the measure of all things.
In the last 500 years there has been two broad historical shifts. One about 1500 with the overthrow of the ptolomeic universe and the protestant reformation. The second was about 1750 with Newtonian science corresponding to the great Arian heresies.
We are in the midst of a third shift whose contours are only vaguely understood currently.
Wrethard quoted:
“ever since 9/11, locals in Central Asia and the Middle East have spread tall tales about American super-technology: … tanks with magnetic, grenade-repelling armor.”
The M1 Abrams armor doesn’t use magnetism but the explosive based reactive armor is almost as magic. The Wikipedia articles about the M1 Abrams and “reactive armour” are quite interesting (usual caveats about trusting Wikipedia still apply).
It would seem that AQ has a chip on its shoulder.
Is it just me being all morally superior, or does anyone else think the Taliban must be feeling *really* picked on right about now. The more they throw acid in women’s eyes and kidnap students and try to terrorize farmers, the more “magic” they have to deal with in the form of unseen Predators, snooping x-ray visioned satellite eyes, and now tracking chips.
If you’re a 13th Century thug whose turban is wound too tight, how do you begin to explain all of these things to yourself?
Charles said:
“The problem with the atheists theory is that it only just sets back in time the origins of the germ line. that is even if it were space aliens that seeded the earth–where did they get their biology from?”
You can get wadded up on the “God is an alien” argument.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.”
Human civilization has been around for about 5000 years. Life started on the Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. If the time that life has existed on the Earth could be thought of as a year then our civilization has lasted about 45 seconds.
Now imagine that life on a nearby alien planet started about the same time as ours. Assume that this alien world got whacked by an asteroid one time less than our world did over its history. Getting whacked one time less means the alien civilization could be millions of years more advanced than ours.
Different point on this topic. Assume the universe is an artifact and not merely the consequence of a random process (the atheists are wrong). If the universe is an artifact then it is reasonable to presume the designer had an intention. Perhaps the designer’s intention was reproduction, i.e. the universe is an egg to produce a bigger and better “god”. From this perspective, God really could be an alien.
NahnCee asked:
“If you’re a 13th Century thug whose turban is wound too tight, how do you begin to explain all of these things to yourself?”
It’s the will of Allah. Allah works in mysterous ways. However, fear not! As Allah’s holy warriors, the Taliban are on the paths of righteousness and can do no wrong (by definition).
The “logic” is circular. You don’t argue with the Taliban. Instead, you use the most cost effective munition available and move on to the next target.
Air strikes = Hand of Allah
That’s how the Talibs call it.
Getting whacked one time less means the alien civilization could be millions of years more advanced than ours.
Or, it could mean all they’ve got is dinosauers wandering around, eating each other.
God works in mysterious ways.
Or, they might be really advanced reptilians.
“It would seem that AQ has a chip on its shoulder.”
Priceless.
During Black Hawk Down the islamists used non-combatants as a flesh wall.
It should be apparent that the Talibs are mixing in and out of native populations so as to neutralize air power, particularly at night.
The only real solution is more boots on the ground, a lot more.
The only army that can pull that duty is the Indian Army.
BTW AQ specifically targets our non-combatant populations. Hot beds of Taliban-AQ forces should be put on notice that by their actions so be it their fate.
Free fire zones should be on the table. Just give prior notice. Then make the area truly an empty space: level every structure. Haunt it by day and by night. Make those tribes affiliated with AQ the dispossessed.
Those who violate the Geneva standards of conduct must be made to feel the consequence.
As it stands AQ figures that they have winning tactics and strategy. This aids recruitment big time.
Al Qaeda’s Xbox Fantasy Game
Gitmo interrogators told him “that Begg in their opinion is a hardened terrorist who has used the opportunity of release to enter the public information forum in a big way.
“He is doing more good for al Qaeda as a British poster boy than he would ever do carrying an AK-47,” Gitmo’s chief interrogator Paul Rester told Cucullu.
Begg’s propaganda efforts will now include a disgusting video game in which Begg, who once admitted he was a committed al Qaeda fighter, gets to target “mercenaries” — in reality, stand-ins for American servicemen.
They are already using RFID and satellite surveillance to harass and attack people in the states. See http://www.satweapons.com for a book about a woman in Texas stalked and raped by a former FBI agent. Click on the publisher icon!
Very interesting. How small can you make an RDIF tag? Can they take advantage of GPS positioning? Can they be used to record and transmit data, like the ID’s of other RDIF tags they have come in close proximity to? Will they still work if they are implanted under someone’s skin?
Imagine a small UAV about the size of the radio-controlled toy airplanes that exist now, armed only with a small poisoned tipped .22 LR cartridge, looking for any targets that emit the signature from a small list of RDIF tags. Deadly, cheap, and hard to detect until its too late to be able to do anything about it.
Interesting indeed.
“Air strikes = Hand of Allah”
I think if I were a black-bearded Taliban male person, I would notice that the “hand of Allah” invariably seems to swat down and squish me and my Allah-fearing buddies. It hardly ever seems to smash down and swat the Western warriors (what we would call “friendly fire”, but don’t tell the Taliban that).
Given that the hand of Allah seems to be *so* prejudiced against me and my bearded buddies, I’d have to start wondering what I was doing wrong … or start looking for a new God. Of course, my new God would have to guarantee me the same sorts of superiority as my old Allah, including the right to beat on everything in sight, to sit about lazily all day, and to just generally act like a stupid jerk. And increasingly, those sorts of Gods seem to be hard to find.
I earlier said:
“Getting whacked one time less means the alien civilization could be millions of years more advanced than ours.”
bob responded:
“Or, it could mean all they’ve got is dinosauers wandering around, eating each other.”
This dances around the issue of the Gaia Hypothesis versus the Medea Hypothesis.
Gaia Hypothesis: the process of biology tends to make worlds more habitable, i.e. biology drives a constructive feedback process to the environment.
Medea Hypothesis: the process of biology is intrinsically self-destructive, e.g. a yeast grows exponentially until it consumes its food supply and then dies in its own waste products.
I believe there are aspects of truth to both Gaia and Medea. If Gaia was entirely true then only simple microorganism would inhabit the Earth in a state of complete equilibrium. If Medea was completely true, then all life on Earth would have been extinguished the first time the planet was stressed, e.g. after an asteroid impact or serious climate change.
It appears that “creative destruction” is built into Darwanism. If a yeast grows exponentially then another life form will come along that likes to eat yeast or the waste products from yeast. The important point is that life on Earth does not allow for equilibrium. An interesting corollary to this observation: Large economic systems also do not allow for equilbrium.
So man was put on this Earth to Eat Yeast waste products.
No wonder I like beer so much
Doug,,”to everything there is a time”and I feel the time is now. Cheers
Very interesting. How small can you make an RDIF tag?
Pinhead size or smaller. They can go in a credit card.
Can they take advantage of GPS positioning?
Don’t think so. But I’m mostly familiar with the passive kind.
Can they be used to record and transmit data, like the ID’s of other RDIF tags they have come in close proximity to?
Don’t think so. Think of them like a bar code that can be read from a distance. The UPS guy can use a reader and tell which packages are in his truck because each one has an RFID chip in it. Or your baggage at the airport can easily be identified from a distance.
Will they still work if they are implanted under someone’s skin?
The chips that they insert under the skin of dogs to identify them if they’re stolen are RFID chips.
Sorry for the long post but this may be of interest..The RFID chip itself is tiny but can be powerful. Some passive chips have rudimentary microprocessors and 1-2K of memory available for storage of readable info (product model, serial number, production lot etc..) but passive chips are just that- they only speak when spoken to and only say what you’ve stored in them. Passive tags are dependent on the interrogating source radiation for operating power so they can’t record anything. No incident RF field and they’re dead bugs.
Active chips can monitor and store sensor info- I’ve mostly seen audio (voices) or seismic (footsteps + vehicle traffic) in the literature and some of them had GPS as an option. These active tags can phone home themselves, be interrogated by portals or basestations (or UAVs), be part of a huge array of active sensors or be physically retrieved for data dump. Not all of them are sinister-a friend of mine makes active tags that record the temperature of a container during shipment.
From what I’ve seen the true limitation on RFID tag size is antenna aperture- smaller antennas require higher RF power/shorter range to excite passive chips and lowers the battery life and/or useful range of active chips. Typical reader powers for commercial passive tags I’ve seen are 1-2W of RF power- about equivalent to a cellphone. Higher reader RF power yields greater range but raises reader cost (cost is important-you need a lot of readers in your inventory system) and there are risks to humans near higher power reader antennas. Commercial passive tags must also be cheap- less than a nickel each to be cost-effective. Chips are less than a penny each but just the area of copper used for patterned antennas alone can cost half the tag budget so there is a lot of effort on finding the optimum size antenna and reader power. To get cheaper decent-sized antennas some companies have printed antennas on paper and fabrics with conductive inks but there are durability issues to be resolved. Chances are you have one or more passive RFIDs in your home in some product, product packaging or documentation- so get used to putting your new shoes, credit cards and drivers licenses in the microwave for a few seconds to “fumigate” them. Otherwise those little bugs will tell any and all who you are and what ya got.
Put one in every one of the GITMO boys then let them go and follow the trails.
Problem is how to get one in without them noticing. You might be able to get one inside a capsule disguised as medicine or in food. It could attach iteself to the intestinal wall by means of tiny barbs (you wouldnt feel it) which would become permanent as the tissue grows around it. You would coat it with something which would dissolve when it hits the right spot, like a time release capsule.
Spindok
spindok said:
“Put one in every one of the GITMO boys then let them go and follow the trails.”
Better yet, leak to the New York Times that every jihadist captured by the United States has had an RFID implanted in their skull’s frontal sinus. The jihadists out their will assume anyone previously captured is a homing beacon. They’ll either shun the previously captured jihadist or perform a lobotomy on him while trying to extract the nonexistent RFID.
This is the fun stuff. And if you read carefully you can see that it is being used. Sometimes the good guys (us) just seem awfully lucky.
Faster please!!
One hates to laugh in such circumstances but this one has me laughing.
However, you observance that: But targeting decisions may rely on multiple sources of data, of which the readouts from RFID tags are just one. is likely the case in all sorts of criminal & intelligence endeavors. One frequent thing the left say against “torture” is the tortured person says anything to make the torture end, and I do not doubt it all, but hardly any decision such as targeting relies on a single source.
Now back to the RFID