State Legislators slowly come to see threat of rampant RFID

RFIDWell I had gotten back on the RFID bandwagon and now comes this story. My students sometimes think I am trying to tell them a tall tale when I bring up RFID. Then we see who has bought clothing with the RFID tag in it--it is not identified as RFID, but the tag is in a little pouch usuall with a scissors icon on it and it tells you to cut it out before you wash the clothing. The little plastic "thing" is the RFID circuit.

Concerns about RFID center around surreptitious scanning and tracking, since data on the chips can be picked up by either an authorized or an unauthorized reader without the knowledge of the person carrying the chip. For example, a student participating in a protest on a state university campus could be scanned by a campus policeman carrying a reader to track his political activities. Or, depending on the kind of data stored on the card, someone could read the data on a chip in order to clone it and create false documents.