Quote:
Starting in early 2006, the U.S. Department of State will begin issuing passports with 64-kilobyte RFID (radio frequency identification) chips that will contain the name, nationality, gender, date of birth, and place of birth of the passport holder, as well as a digitized photograph of that person.
But RFID is not a "tracking chip." The idea was to make the passport harder to forge, not to pinpoint my location. RFID does not do that inherently; the only reason you can use it to track anything is because of the reader. The location is inferred from where an RFID tag is scanned The RFID chip would not contain my current residence or be able to tell anyone where my travel destination is, nor my hotel reservations or favorite places to eat. All convenient places to kill me, but it doesn't work quite like that. Now if you go on to read this article, you find that there was a legitimate concern about the security (the information could be picked up by strangers using a remote scanner, an invasion of my privacy), but put down the kool-aid.