It Gets Under Your Skin: RFID Chip And Biometric Data

Grab your tri-corner tinfoil conspiracy hat because we’re about to chase the white rabbit into the conspiracy rabbit warren!

Let’s begin our adventure with a news headline from December 20, 2021: “Swedish startup Epicenter unveils rice-sized microchip implant that stores your COVID vaccine passport under your skin and is read with technology used to take contactless payments.” (source)

Key points from article:

• • The implant can be read by any device using the near-field communication (NFC) protocol

• • Epicenter, a Stockholm-based startup, unveiled a new way of carrying around a COVID vaccine passport – in a microchip implanted under your skin

• • Hannes Sjöblad, chief distribution officer, has the chip in his arm and simply waves a smartphone over it to pull up his vaccination status

• • The microchip sits directly beneath the skin, either in the arm or between the thumb and forefinger.

• • When activated by a reader a few inches away, a small amount of data flows between the two devices via electromagnetic waves.

• • “Next year we are going to use it for something else,” said Sjoblad.

Now, this is NOT new tech and has been around in various forms from the 1940s, but became more useful on smaller scales in the late 1960s. Today this is the same tech we use to chip our cats and dogs at the vet. I’m old enough to remember when people were suggesting children be chipped or bar coded during the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s and the religious groups claiming it was “the mark of the beast.” Maybe they were right, because government has become a beast. The proper name for this tech is RFID and Wikipedia has this to say on it:

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. An RFID system consists of a tiny radio transponder, a radio receiver and transmitter. When triggered by an electromagnetic interrogation pulse from a nearby RFID reader device, the tag transmits digital data, usually an identifying inventory number, back to the reader.

Let’s be really clear: these devices work in the 12 to 16 bit memory range so they are small enough to be well smaller than the rice-sized capsule that holds them. There is no way they themselves can hold any more than a string of numbers, so how does it keep your “Vaccine Passport” or shall we say “papers please”? They can’t. So if they can’t, where is the data? On the “cloud,” or in real world terms “somebody else’s computer.” But whose computer? That’s a good question, and will depend on whether it is outsourced or kept on a centralized system by your local, state, or federal government.

Now notice the big neon red flag in the key points section, “next year we are going to use it for something else.” What something else? Maybe tie your debit card to it? Maybe your real passport? How about ALL of your health information? Marital status? Maybe your family tree? How about your DNA markers? Maybe it could have access to your facial or iris biometrical data? Does this sound far fetched? It really isn’t if you read the smaller headlines in the news and ignore grandstanding celebrities and politicians that take the headlines.

Next red flag, “The implant can be read by any device using NFC.” If you have experience with really good RFID security systems you know that the reader can be several feet away and still open a door for you, so how is your personal data secured? Can a hacker in an economy car wait along a crowded street and swoop up tens if not hundreds of data sets? All they actually need is the number, not the person.

I’ve dumped a whole bunch of what ifs on you, but remember it is only conspiracy theory until it is proven. Atomic energy was speculation until the Manhattan Project and what’s speculation but a nice way to say conspiracy theory? Here’s another more recent example: For decades there was speculation that said Franklin D. Roosevelt knew about the incoming Pearl Harbor attack but did nothing. Now we know that was at least partially true, from speculation to historical fact.

So why did the Soviet block countries require an internal passport system or “paper’s please?” It was their way of tracking the movements of their subjects and ensuring you were allowed to go from point A to point B. Now, if you are a United States citizen you’re pretty comfortable hopping in your car and driving to where you want to be; how would you feel if you now had to give an internal customs agent your finger and find out “Sorry Mr. Doe, but you are not authorized to enter the next state, turn around and go home.” Maybe it is your vaccination status and Governor Nuisance decided you can’t come in, or maybe it is because now your social media has been tied to this RFID chip and you said mean things about the governor.¹

Government toll operators already track vehicles entering and leaving toll roads via RFID tags drivers place on their vehicles to speed along and not worry about paying tolls, so abuse of this is not too far fetched. Each and everyone of those tags is unique, so if you have a toll pass from Florida and you visit Oklahoma it may not bill you for Oklahoma but your car can still be tracked as to where it is. Heavy haulers also use a system like this to avoid stopping at scales. Once they are weighed and the load recorded, they stay in certain marked lanes and breeze right by the scales and the state knows which scales they have “used.” From Gizmodo September 13, 2013:

“E-ZPass uses RFID. It’s cool tech, but hackable and trackable in ways that the companies who use it don’t really want anyone to talk about. E-ZPass RFID tags, for instance, can be scanned in plenty of places that aren’t tollbooths. A hacker known only as “Puking Monkey” has shown that it happens all the time around the streets of NYC, and talked about his findings at DEFCON.”

“Turns out though, that this was the result of a project called Midtown in Motion, a New York City traffic management system that is using E-ZPass RFIDs to track cars through the city center. It’s not exactly clear what kind of information the Department of Transportation is scraping, but it’s something.”

Having your money right in your finger? Sounds convenient, right? Are you comfortable with third parties knowing everything you bought? How about your government? In some places buying the wrong thing could put you on a watch list. But why would the government know? Because there has been a movement for years to abolish cash and a few places have already tried.

From May 30, 2014 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Respected economist Kenneth Rogoff has called for the abolition of cash to aid central bank policymaking in a world of record low interest rates – and make life more difficult for criminals.”

Now who is the criminal? Sex workers for one group. How about a gunsmith? How do you buy anything unnoticed without cash? What if your social credit score won’t allow you to buy a plane ticket to grandma?  Only those who currently hold crypto currencies could buy anything, but in the end, no one would have a way of cashing those out in a cash less society.

The overall point here is by allowing these to go into place we give away a piece of ourselves, our privacy, and some more of our diminishing rights. With each new emergency we lose a little bit more freedom. So, will we be free persons, or tagged like our dogs and cats ready to be cataloged into new groups of keep or destroy? Don’t think it won’t go there; ever hear of a “Reservation?” Ask an American Indian about those; history is full of abuses to we the people.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”—Winston Churchill

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”—Rahm Emanuel

“The last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”—Viktor Frankl

1. I am well aware of the potential for our smart phones to show exactly where we are at any given time.  I am also aware that the microphones and cameras are vulnerable to hackers.  A smart phone can be put in a special bag and pretty much stop information going in and out of it—you really can’t do that with an implant.  Phone data requires a court order to be obtained, though, and these RFID chips are not, as I see it, requiring a court order.  So cellular phones are NOT the topic here.