Microchips

By: Markham Heid

Alexandria residents soon will have to pay for larger home recycling bins featuring built-in monitoring devices.

The City Council added a mandatory $9 charge to its residents' annual waste collection fee.

That cash -- roughly $180,000 collected from 19,000 residents-- will pay for new larger recycling carts equipped with computer microchips, which will allow the city to keep tabs on its bins and track resident participation in the city's recycling program.

Article continues if you're interested, but that's all the info I wanted to note.

At the Washington Post

By Bruce Schneier September 16, 2006

If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it -- even if it's not set to expire anytime soon. If you don't have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don't want one of these chips in your passport.

By itself, this is no problem. But RFID chips don't have to be plugged in to a reader to operate. Like the chips used for automatic toll collection on roads or automatic fare collection on subways, these chips operate via proximity. The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.

I've been a computer programmer, I've been an an intelligence officer, I've been a do-it-yourself home repairman and electronics technician. My first bachelors degree was in Philosophy. I've always had an aversion to being watched or monitored. I've always had an active sense of humor with a tendency to practical jokes. I like to tinker with things and push the edges of the envelope, the limits of the patience of those who believe that they control me.

This is actually a recycle of a prank I did for no particular reason at work about 20 years ago. A mobile blood-donation bus would come to our building each quarter, and I would give a pint. For some reason, after answering all the stupid questions about where you were born and visited, you had to peel off and stick on a "yes" or "no" use my blood barcode sticker on the form. I would pocket the unused "no" sticker, and when I returned to my cubicle, would place it over the inventory barcode sticker on some piece of furniture or equipment and smile.

Just the thought of that someday in the future, when my evildoing would cause a bad day for some wretched bean-counter brought me such joy.

The Idea: I have not seen the new chipped passport. I have seen our chipped recycle bin in Texas. This whole idea depends on your ability to do a little undetectable surgery and then to keep a straight face in front of a baffled immigrations and customs agent. Yeah, you know where we're going - a chip transplant. The passport gets the recycle chip and the recycle bin gets the passport chip.

As more and more items get radio frequency identification (RFID) chips and as the government "chips" more and more forms of ID, the possibilities to Foul Up the system will grow geometrically. I can hardly wait.

While we're on the subject, you do know what those crumbs at the bottom of a bag of potato chips are called, don't you?

That's right: microchips.