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