p2pnet - rss feed: Dignitaries bugged at World Summit
Three researchers who were able to scam official badges for last week’s World Summit on the Information Society were shocked to find the badges - given to dignitaries including presidents and prime ministers - were bugged.
In a report issued after the conference ended on Friday, Alberto Escudero-Pascual, Stephane Koch and George Danezis said badges assigned to more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and other high-level officials from 174 countries, including the US, had radio-frequency identification chips (RFIDs) embedded in them.
RFID chips track a person’s movement in ‘real time,’ says Audrey Hudson’s Washington Times report here, going on: "U.S. groups have called for a voluntary moratorium on using the chips in consumer items until the technology and its effects on privacy and civil liberties are addressed."
Escudero-Pascual is a researcher in computer security and privacy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Koch is the president of Internet Society Geneva, and Danezis studies ‘privacy-enhancing’ technologies and computer security at Cambridge University in the UK, says Hudson’s story.
The three chose names for fake ID cards from a list printed on the summit’s Web site of attendees and, "we were able to register for the summit and obtain an official pass by just showing a fake plastic identity card and being photographed via a Web cam with no other document or registration number required to obtain the pass," the researchers are quoted as saying.
"The new technology can fix the exact location of virtually any consumer product and the humans who wear and carry the items," says TalkLeft here. "The radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips now in mass production are affixed to postage-stamp-size labels."
"During the registration process, we requested information about the future use of the picture and other information that was taken, and the built-in functionalities of the seemingly innocent plastic badge. No public information or privacy policy was available upon our demands that could indicate the purpose, processing or retention periods for the data collected. The registration personnel were obviously not properly informed and trained," the WT quoted the report as saying.
