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