RFID INDUSTRY SUMMONS LAP DOGS TO SQUELCH SPYCHIPS EXPOSE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 14, 2005

RFID INDUSTRY SUMMONS LAP DOGS TO SQUELCH SPYCHIPS EXPOSE
Panicked Proponents Resort to Half Truths, Outright Lies

What do you say you're caught red-handed planning to track people with
RFID when you've promised you never would? If you're a global
corporation with millions of dollars invested in the technology, you
call in your chips -- er, favors. RFID industry mouthpieces AIM Global
and RFID Journal have both heeded the call of their advertisers and
supporters, nipping at the heels of the new book Spychips: How Major
Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID.
Even start-up companies have tried to join the pack with critiques of
their own.

"The companies behind the RFID industry must have thought they were
calling out their attack dogs, but they apparently called their lap dogs
by mistake" says Spychips co-author Katherine Albrecht. "Their attempts
to criticize our book are toothless and feeble. In fact, they're using
half-truths and outright lies to try to deflect from the real issues."

She points to several statements by RFID Journal's Mark Roberti as
examples. In his review of the book he claims the authors "want a
complete and total ban on the use of RFID for all consumer
applications."

"That's absolute nonsense," says Albrecht, "Perhaps Mr. Roberti didn't
read our book. We make it very clear that the only appropriate role for
RFID legislation is to require companies to tell us when products
contain RFID tags so we can make our own decisions about whether or not
to buy them. We have never called for a ban on RFID."

The rest of Roberti's critique is equally flawed. Albrecht's rebuttal to
his review is posted on the Spychips website at:
http://www.spychips.com/book/roberti-rebuttal.html.

Spychips co-author Liz McIntyre takes on AIM Global's review of the
book. "AIM Global sinks its gums into Spychips, shaking it almost
imperceptibly from side to side before collapsing into agreement with
us," she writes.

AIM admits the patents revealed in the book are "more than a little
disquieting," and that "the book does contain some valid concerns and
highlights some of the more outlandish claims made by RFID proponents."
However, AIM's anonymous reviewer deflects the blame for these worrisome
ideas away from IBM, Procter & Gamble, and NCR where they belong and
attributes them to unnamed "marketers."

Among these more "outlandish claims" and "disquieting proposals" are
IBM's patent pending "Identification and Tracking of Persons Using
RFID-Tagged Items," Procter & Gamble's patent pending "Systems and
Methods for Tracking Consumers in a Store Environment," and NCR's
patented "Automated Monitoring of Activity of Shoppers in a Market,"
McIntyre notes.

"People can see through the industry's attempts at damage control and
recognize them as spin," McIntyre observes. "When the industry expends
this much energy trying to squelch a book, it's clear they're afraid,
and, frankly, they should be. They can't squirm out of the truth this
time. We've caught them with their own words, and it's all footnoted and
documented."

McIntyre has posted her rebuttal to AIM Global's review at:
http://www.spychips.com/book/aim-rebuttal.html.

When asked whether they'll be entertaining other rebuttal opportunities,
the authors laugh, "We hate to turn down any opportunity to shame the
opposition, but our editors remind us that we have more important tasks
at hand. Besides, we've already done a thorough job addressing just
about every issue the industry could lob our way."

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every
Move with RFID is the winner of the Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing
the Literature of Liberty. Authored by Harvard doctoral researcher
Katherine Albrecht and former bank examiner Liz McIntyre, the book is
meticulously researched, drawing on patent documents, corporate source
materials, conference proceedings, and firsthand interviews to paint a
convincing -- and frightening -- picture of the threat posed by RFID.

Despite its hundreds of footnotes and academic-level accuracy, the book
remains lively and readable, according to critics, who have called it a
"techno-thriller" and "a masterpiece of technocriticism."

================================================== ===================

CASPIAN: Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering
Opposing supermarket "loyalty" cards and other retail surveillance
schemes since 1999

http://www.spychips.com/
http://www.nocards.org/

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may find it of interest.

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http://www.spychips.com/book/roberti-rebuttal.html

Dismantling the RFID Journal's critique of Spychips
by Katherine Albrecht, co-author of Spychips

November 14, 2005
It's little surprise the RFID industry and its corporate supporters have come out swinging against our new book, Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. After all, the book devastates their claims that RFID poses no risks to personal privacy and that no one wants to abuse the technology. We show indisputably that many key players in the industry have some very bad plans.

The truth is that RFID could soon become one of the most powerful surveillance tools in history, giving its corporate masters unprecedented ability to track and control people. With hundreds of footnotes and impeccable research, Spychips makes an air-tight case that some of the biggest corporations in the world have spent plenty of time and money developing ingenious ways to do just that.

The word is getting around quickly. On its release last month, Spychips flew to the top of the Amazon bestseller charts as a #1 "Mover and Shaker," hit the top ten Nonfiction bestseller list, and spent over a month as a Current Events bestseller. In a single month, the book has sold thousands of copies and is now in its fourth printing. What's more, it has received rave reviews from the journalistic and privacy communities, who have called it "brilliantly written," "stunningly powerful," and "scathing."

No wonder the industry is scared.

Anyone who has read the book knows that as soon as the general public discovers what's being planned for RFID there will be hell to pay. The threat is being taken seriously enough that major RFID promoters like Mark Roberti, editor of the RFID Journal, have devoted considerable effort to stemming the damage. At least that's the most obvious explanation we could find for Mr. Roberti's expending five pages of prime Internet real estate to discussing everything about our book except its central point -- namely that:

Major corporations have been caught red-handed describin ways to use RFID to spy on the rest of us.


Reading Mr. Roberti's rebuttal is like entering an alternate universe. Though he states that "the authors' claims go to the heart of the privacy issue and, therefore, deserve to be examined in depth," he gives our claims only the most cursory mention, ignoring scores of pages of evidence and documentation that prove companies not only recognize RFID's human tracking capability but have developed ways to harness it.
Why doesn't Mr. Roberti mention sworn patent documents from IBM describing ways to secretly follow innocent people in libraries, theaters, and public restrooms through the RFID tags in their clothes and belongings? Where is his outrage over BellSouth's patent-pending plans to pick through our garbage and skim the data contained in the RFID tags we discard? To the extent Mr. Roberti mention patents at all, he dismisses them as reflecting a desire to serve customers better, but the disturbing patents we have found reveal a corporate mindset that cannot be so easily dismissed.

In his five-page rebuttal, Mr. Roberti completely avoids other embarrassing corporate schemes, too. There is no mention of Philips' plans to capture "hidden" RFID data from the products in our homes and send the results to marketers -- through our own appliances, no less. Of course, since Philips is a major RFID Journal advertiser, it shouldn't surprise us that Mr. Roberti also neglects to tell his readers that the company has patented plans to place nearly imperceptible RFID tags in shoes -- with the goal of later interrogating them through readers in the floor.

Those aren't the only cold, hard facts in our book that Mr. Roberti ignores. Much of his nearly 3,400 word critique is spent on politics, despite that fact that only a small portion of our book deals with that topic. Given his obvious interest in government abuse, we might have expected Mr. Roberti to have at least mentioned the fact that hundreds of people were tracked with RFID animal tagging technology designed for use on feed cattle and lab rats -- by our own government. And Mr. Roberti steers way clear of mentioning deep organ implants that can remotely electroshock people, and bulletproof, hypodermic needle armbands that can knock individuals to the ground unconscious.

Of course, we recognize that Mr. Roberti cannot directly acknowledge the dirty laundry we've exposed by detailing the embarrassing plans of key RFID industry advertisers and longstanding sponsors. As the industry's chief "journalistic" cheerleader, the RFID Journal knows that part of its job is to make the industry look good and divert attention away from scandals that could taint its reputation.

Considering how hard it is to attack a book without discussing its central content matter, however, Mr. Roberti would have been well advised to leave our book on the shelf. Unfortunately for his corporate sponsors, he chose the less prudent path and waded in deep. In the following pages. we take a look at the numerous factual and logical errors Mr. Roberti commits in his critique of Spychips.

MR. ROBERTI'S ERRORS

For each point, we re-state Mr. Roberti's position in his own words, followed by a correction, comment, or admonishment of our own.

#1: Stating that CASPIAN wants a "ban" on RFID
#2: Misrepresenting the purpose of "Spychips"
#3: Claiming that companies will never obtain each other's data
#4: Suggesting that it is admirable to spy on customers
#5: Suggesting that RFID-based watching systems are the same as human salesmen
#6: Dismissing the feasibility of a power-saving Peeping Tom system
#7: Believing that consumers must somehow "agree" to wear spychipped clothing
#8: Casting false aspersions on the quality of our research
#9: Claiming that patents don't matter
#10: Using convoluted logic: Suggesting that since CASPIAN is keeping society safe from RFID abuse, we should stop alerting the public to planned abuses (Huh?)
#11: Suggesting that Marks & Spencer's use of RFID exonerates others
#12: Believing that technologically advanced countries wouldn't abuse RFID
#13: Claiming that people could easily escape a nightmare RFID world
#14: Stating that totalitarianism is not about tracking people
#15: Ignoring the power of technologically-enhanced secrecy
#16: Grossly underestimating the effects of a bloody dictatorship
#17: Shifting blame from abusive companies onto activists' shoulders
#18: Holding others to a journalistic standard he himself does not meet