RFID – ubisurv

Implants vs. Wearable devices

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why it is that implanted tracking devices have never really taken off in humans. Just a few years ago, there were all kinds of people laying out rather teleological versions of technological trajectories that led inevitably to mass human implanantation – and not just the US Christian right, who saw RFID as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy.

I think there are many reasons, including negative public reaction (implants really are a step too far, even for the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ crowd) and the fact that a lot of the promotion of human RFID implants was actually the PR work of one very loud company (Verichip) and did not actually have a lot of basis in either social reality or market research. But the other major reason is to do with other technological developments, particularly in wearable computing and sensor networks. In most cases, implants solve a problem that doesn’t exist (the idea that people want to remove a tracking device that might be there for very good – although I am not saying, indisputably good – reasons, usually medical ones). And where there are no good reasons, there’s probably no case for tracking at all.

So devices like this – temporary, printed or stick-on and removable – are far more what is likely to become the solution to any actual problem of tracking or monitoring for medical reasons. And the relative ease with which it can be removed by the wearer does at least mean that there is some room for negotiation and consent at more than just one point in the process. Of course, such removable, wearable tracking are still not somehow free of ethical and political considerations – and some may argue that the very appearance of consent actually hints at the generation of a greater conformity and self-surveillance, but the issues are of a slightly different nature to those raised by implanted devices.

The Mark of the Beast?

I’ve been following a case in San Antonio, Texas, over the last few months in which a couple with literalist biblical Christian beliefs had challenged their daughter’s school over its introduction of RFID-enabled name tags and here are some random thoughts. The latest news is that the pupil, Andrea Hernandez, has lost in the US District Court – it could still be taken higher. The case has attracted plenty of coverage internationally, all largely emphasizing the fact that the student concerned had been threatened with expulsion for her (or her family’s) stance, and the ‘mark of the beast’ rhetoric deployed by the parents and the organisation that enabled them to bring the case, the evangelical Christian civil rights organisation, The Rutherford Institute.

A standard Surveillance Studies analysis might be that this was another case of security at all costs in a risk society, and surveillance as the silver bullet for a non-existant problem or a at least an actual problem that might have been solved by other methods. But actually things are rather more complicated and perhaps more mundane here, and the answers seem to lie, as Francesca Menichelli has suggested in her recent (and as yet unpublished) PhD on the installation of CCTV camera systems in small towns in Italy, in regional political economy and local government competition.

According to the local newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, when the scheme was introduced, the plan by Northside Independepent School District was essentially not a security or an organisational issue but a matter of gaining access to extra finance. Although the scheme was estimated to cost $525,065 to implement and $136,005 per annum in administration and maintenance, the extra-detailed attendance information resulting from the chip cards could enable them district to access around $1.7 million in state grants.

Essentially, surveillance here is simply something that circulates in competition between entities -whether school districts or cities – for resources. Of course the scheme has not been studied in its actual practice yet so we don’t know what actual difference (or lack of difference) it would make to any pupil in the way that we do for Menichelli’s case-study cities, where CCTV is described as being almost entirely useless because it was never really intended to be used as anything other than a way of winning resources. However it would seem that the ‘surveillance’ is almost entirely secondary or perhaps even irrelevent. However I certainly do not dismiss the possibility that nefarious or even unintentionally damaging things could be done with the location data gathered from the chip cards.

It is also the case that the school district attempted to compromise with the pupil by offering to remove the chip from her ID card, essentially limiting the surveillance that could be conducted of her to conventional visual methods. The rejection of this compromise is the reason the District Court threw out Andrea Hernandez’s case. However if the School District is accepting that there is an opt-out possible on grounds of belief then they are potentially undermining the whole scheme – which relies on the generation of accurate attendance and circulation data. Again, one interpretation could be that they aren’t really interested in the data for itself, which reinforces the argument about the instrumental nature of the surveillance scheme in the state funding context, but the other interpretation could be that the school was banking on her exception being the only one, or one of a tiny number, that would not significantly undermine it. The other question here is: is it really the RFID chip that’s the problem, or the surveillant assemblage of which it is but one tiny part? In rejecting the compromise, Hernandez and the Rutherford Institute seem to be suggesting the latter, and here we are a long way from Christian eschatalogy and the ‘mark of the beast’.

(Thanks to Heather Morgan for initially pointing out to me that it was all about the money!)

Chipping Pre-School Kids in the USA

ACLU is reporting that nursery schools kids in Richmond, California are being issued with jerseys embedded with RFID chips. GPS-enabled and/or RFID-chipped clothing has been available for a while now, and there have also been (pre-)schools in other countries that have issued tracking devices to kids, notably in Yokohama in Japan, but this appears to be the first time in the USA. RFID is a very simple, insecure technology, and this type of initiative gives a false sense of security and is about at once raising and appeasing social anxiety and parental paranoia about the incredibly rare instances of child kidnapping. ACLU note correctly that this is just likely to make stalking and kidnapping easier as harder, but really all this does is enable the school to know where the jersey is – like left on the back of a bus, swapped with a friend or thrown in a ditch. It’s more pointless security theater, but at a more intimate level than the kind we are used to at airports and public buildings.

Information-rich animals

Iris scanning has been proposed for horse by a company called Global Animal Management (GAM) Inc. As bloodstock is a huge and lucrative business – feeding everything from the private obsessions of the super-rich through the horseracing industry to the dreams of teenage horse-enthusiasts – it is not surprising to see such investment in biometrics. Racehorses were, after all, the first living creatures to be regularly microchipped. Vets seem sceptical about the idea, but surely members of the medical profession would be more enthusiastic about non-invasive replacements for invasive identification techniques like RFID?

Ironically, support for the scepticism comes form GAM’s own website, where a very interesting short video shows just how comprehensive the surveillance of animals through RFID chips has become. RFID chips do not just identify, they carry whole life-cycle information on origins, movements, health and disease and legal compliances. And because of the chips this information is carried with the animal not simply associated with it via a distant database as the result of an occasional scan. The system creates what GAM calls ‘information-rich animals’, which presumably is what makes GAM – and it hopes, its customers – cash-rich too…

(thanks to Aaron Martin, whose reading now seems to include Horse and Hound magazine…)

Pigs subvert surveillance

It is not just human beings who are subjects of surveillance. Animals are increasingly under surveillance too, indeed there are techniques of surveillance and tracking used on animals that are designed to achieve levels of control that (for the most part) would not be tolerated for human beings. Animals are tagged, filmed, implanted, tracked, and even used and adapted for surveillance (see Amber Marks’s book, Headspace, for example) for all kinds of reasons from the economic to the environmental. However, this great story from a BBC kids’ news program demonstrates that some animals can ‘fight back’ in ways that are inventive and heartening.

Many farms now limit the food consumption of individual pigs through the use of electronic Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) collars and gates: once the pig has gone through the gate, the collar communicates with a computerised food distribution system which will provide the pig with what is deemed ‘enough’ for the pig. When the pig has eaten and left the feed stall, it cannot get back in for more because the system knows which collar has already been through the gate.

However, apparently pigs in several locations have independently learnt how to get round this surveillance system. Some pigs hate the collars so much that they rip them off. These pigs then don’t get to eat of course, but other pigs have learnt that if they pick up the collars they can go through the gate a second time – and they have even taught other pigs how to this…

Never mind ‘Big Brother’ and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s another Orwell phrase (from Animal Farm) that comes to mind here: “Four legs good, two legs bad”…!

(Thanks to Aaron Martin for this)