by Jerry
NASA, it turned out, was not the only group that developed robots. By the time I graduated from college, DARPA—that’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—was putting more funds into robots than was NASA. I’d never had any interest in defense contracting, but lots of DARPA-supported research was and is just way cool, cutting-edge stuff. That’s how I wound up working for a Beltway Bandit on a DARPA contract. My bosses no doubt thought about one kind of “dual use” for the new technology while I was imagining another . . . and while I nursed my dreams, if and when NASA ever again had money, of someday building robots at JPL.
It did not, amid the never-ending and ever-expanding war on terror, take much to outspend NASA on robots. My piece of the DARPA project was, not surprisingly, on the electronics side, and the budget scarcely covered salaries. To keep costs down, I did my proof-of-concept work using what the govvies call COTS. That’s “commercial off the shelf,” an acronym which, despite the plain semantics of its phrase, had been nounified. I needed a radio link between a lander and its rover—or, at customer briefings, between a war fighter’s handheld controller and the tiny, semiautonomous scout vehicle it controlled. The cheapest, most accessible COTS used unlicensed radio spectrum. You know: the frequencies used by low-powered gadgets like WiFi wireless LANs and cordless (not cellular) phones.
It was the damnedest thing. My rover would work just fine for days and then, for no apparent reason, it would glitch. Long story short, there was intermittent interference on the command link. My colleagues razzed me about my ill-advised choice of frequency (I didn’t mention the dearth of cordless phones on Mars), and, rather than rebuild, we moved the project into a shielded lab. It didn’t help.
Okay, NOW, long story short. Much time and expensive test equipment later, the problem was traced to several items of new clothing.
Would you care to guess what inexpensive labeling mechanism also uses low-power RF at unregulated frequencies?
There’s no reason to drag my erstwhile employers into this, not that much detective work would be necessary to identify them. For purposes of this history, “the corporation” will do just fine. Given the dual-use nature of my work, and who was funding it, I had been asked to apply for a Top Secret clearance. I had reluctantly gone along, comforted by the two-plus year backlog in clearance investigations. I was new enough to the real world to still be thinking in college-student time: Nothing matters if it can be postponed past the end of a semester.
My bosses at the corporation were beyond ecstatic when I mentioned a friend-of-a-friend introduction to an HSB project manager interested in synergies between my current work and Bureau needs. The HSB got a fast-tracked research project, the corporation got a sole-sourced contract, and I got a bonus and an impressive-sounding title. HSB tracked down my long-dormant clearance application.
After my clearance came through, miraculously processed within a few weeks, I finally began to understand the Bureau’s interest in me.
You can be excused if you believe an RFID can only be read from inches to a few feet away. The reason, when you approach the subway turnstile, you must hold your smart card right next to the sensor is not that the embedded RFID tag can’t be sensed from much greater distances. Precisely because cards can easily be read from several feet away, the same pulse that wakes up and momentarily powers your smart card is activating the cards of everyone near you. Your card must be within inches of the sensor to make its reply sufficiently and unambiguously stronger than all others. The transit folks want to know whose account to decrement for the fare.
After uninvited RFIDs made my robots malf enough times, I concluded it was easier to teach ‘bots to filter out unexpected return pulses than to strip-search everyone entering the lab. Filtering: It sounds deceptively simple. It’s not. Think about coping in real time with arbitrary numbers of RFID tags. Each tag might emit any possible product code or serial number. Each signal as detected by the robot varies unpredictably in strength and direction as I or my coworkers pace. The same filtering technology, repurposed in my homemade scanner, is what made my parking-lot forays productive. The trick was to capture, not reject, the streams of RFID reports.
The HSB wanted my signal-processing logic—and they wanted me to keep enhancing it.
Bureau folks never refer to their headquarters as headquarters, only (in hushed tones) as the John Ashcroft Building. That’s generally abbreviated JAB, and the same wags who dubbed the organization Homeland BS speak as disparagingly of the Junior Achievers Building.
Hushed tones or irreverence? That choice nicely encapsulates my months of ambivalence. No matter how often I returned, the boxy, mostly windowless JAB never lost its hunkered-down, fortress-like aspect. But once I went through the curbside row of massive concrete obstacles unsuccessfully masquerading as planters, passed three tiers of badge readers and armed guards checking photo IDs, penetrated the maze-like corridors into the heart of the structure, an eerie surrealism always manifested itself.
Flyers that advertised carpools and retirement parties were taped beside doors secured by cipher locks and ominous warning signs. Armed agents in well-tailored suits were outnumbered by casually dressed electricians, programmers, janitors, and clerks. Stacks of still-boxed computers on pallets lined the halls, but it took weeks—and then, only if you knew whom to sweet-talk—before the Security and Infrastructure folks would hook one up. Parts of the interior were under construction at all times, providing isolated work space for some investigation or other, and altering pedestrian traffic flow from month to month. Yet somehow, despite all the security, random artisans were allowed into JAB to sell ugly handicrafts at tables in the cafeteria. And somehow, even in the very bowels of JAB, gear would regularly go missing from labs.
My new career had me conflicted from the start. It was hard not to feel good about helping stop the bad guys. I didn’t know, nor did I think I needed to, who was caught how. It was sufficient to hear vaguely that terrorist plots were being disrupted. Evidently I also had no need to know exactly how my ever-longer-range receivers were being applied; in my mind’s over-imaginative eye, I envisioned agents tracking unsuspecting bad guys at a discreet distance. At some level, I recall feeling Roguish—but more like the crazy-coot uncle than a main character. Than like the dapper Marcel St. Clair played by Charles Boyer. And at yet another level, I have to admit, I was a kid set free in a toy store. Where homeland security is concerned, money was never an issue. It is hardly coincidental that the Beltway Bandit pronunciation of HS Bureau became Hasbro.
On the other hand . . . this simply wasn’t a line of work I had ever thought to get into, nor was I getting a single robot an inch closer to Mars or Titan. Nor was I helping Mom and Dad. My new, very humorless, customers had made it abundantly clear that my RFID trolling expeditions were over.
In short, I was confused.
Then Mechanicsville happened.
CNN played softly 24/7 on a dozen TVs mounted high up on pillars throughout the JAB cafeteria. I was on an early lunch break, escaping the computer-room chill of my lab, when murmuring broke out. On-screen, flames engulfed a red barn, surrounded at a safe distance by flasher-equipped unmarked cars, ambulances, and two fire trucks. A trim HSB helicopter had landed to one side of the frame, its rotor still spinning lazily. The screen crawler gave the then-unfamiliar town name in Iowa.
All around me, “Waco” was getting mentioned a lot.
The Branch Davidian references were prescient. That is, although I don’t think the HSB agents all around me knew it at first, children were dying in the conflagration: a high-school science club.
Many network exposés and blogs later, you know what none of us knew then: It was only a gung-ho young teacher trying during spring break to excite kids about physics through model rocketry. That—and some bitter irony here—regulatory overkill.
Respect for a parental phobia has kept my knowledge theoretical, but I understand model rockets. The fuel of choice is ammonium perchlorate composite pr
opellant. If APCP happens to sound familiar, it’s probably because APCP fuels the solid rocket boosters of the space shuttle. APCP is a rubbery mixture of salts, powdered metals, and resins that ignites at about 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The thing is, APCP falls within the purview of the post-9/11 Safe Explosives Act, which means permits, fingerprinting, and background checks before anyone is allowed to buy the stuff. The funny thing is, APCP doesn’t explode; it merely burns like the dickens. If you do buy it, the feds are allowed onto your property at any time and without notice to check for its proper storage.
The Cedar Rapids Rocketeers, like similar clubs, cooked up their APCP from unregulated precursor chemicals, just as farmers mix explosives to blow up tree stumps or “dig” irrigation ditches. It’s all perfectly legal, under a personal use exemption. You might ask: How does one prove personal use? Is it not better, in our dangerous world, to err on the side of caution?
The final count was twenty-six dead: eighteen kids, the teacher, and seven parents.
Based on “a tip,” HSB had begun what spokespeople called an “unscheduled inspection.” Most people who see HSB’s own video of swooping helicopter and onrushing cars think: raid. “Tragically,” the final report concluded, “the unexpected arrivals appear to have caused the unintended indoor ignition of one or more model rockets. A rapidly spreading fire resulted. This only reinforces the tragedy of citizens working with such dangerous, generally illegal materials.”
Like most small businesspeople I know, Dad has little respect for economists. “If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end to end,” he likes to say, “they wouldn’t reach a conclusion.” And, “Economists correctly predicted nine of the past five recessions.” That last one, it turns out, is attributable to an economist.
My ambivalence about HSB ended with the cold shower that was Mechanicsville. There were real human consequences when domestic intelligence foiled nine of the past five terrorist plots.
Mechanicsville and the subsequent investigations raised plenty of questions. One of the most obvious—still officially unanswered—was, “Who tipped off HSB.” That is: Who somehow confused a science club with terrorists? HSB did not reveal its sources, of course. I heard just enough hallway chatter to know that the question worried the hell out of people—and enough to disbelieve the media speculation that Homeland BS was covering for some naïve or competitive or vindictive classmate of the victims, lest others hesitate in the future to inform.
Two kinds of people work in JAB: those who carry guns and those who don’t. The latter (which includes contractors like me) tend not to get much respect. Too many of the former know squat about computers. In 2003, the FBI was training agents how to use a mouse.
And yet . . . the modern approach to security is all about information.
Unless you’ve been on Titan, you must know passenger screening became serious business after 9/11. The last time I checked (Airline Disclosures of Passenger Information), six airlines and two big reservation systems admit to having shared at least samples of their passenger data with the Transportation Security Administration. No one asked the passengers if they cared to be part of the experiment.
After 9/11, everyone demanded to know why the FBI hadn’t known ahead of time. No matter how many hostile operations were prevented in the intervening, fairly peaceful years, the question came back, big time, after 2/4. One result was establishment of the HSB. Not coincidentally, the biggest technology project the HSB now has going is its Consolidated Data Warehouse, the mother lode of information about anything. I had no need to know what was in it, nor did I, but it was clear that the approach being taken to better connecting dots in the future was: collect lots more dots.
Dots like: Several of the Cedar Rapids students had recently purchased “extremist Islamicist literature.” That literature, as NBC News broke soon after this HSB explanation, was extra-credit reading in the curriculum of a World Civ class.
For a time I had a privileged user account on CDW. Designing gadgets did not require any access, let alone privileged access, but my testing collected scads of RFID transaction data, which I had kept, in my HSB lab, within a database management system. When a dayshift database administrator on CDW announced her vacation plans, I got volunteered to backfill.
My new, unwanted DBA task required occasional poking about the database, just to make certain everything was operating okay. The cardinal rule is: Never look up yourself. It’s apparently bad form to check whether you’re under investigation (evidently, double agent Robert Hanssen monitored his own records at the FBI for years for signs of suspicion). One thing I looked up instead, as a sample query, involved press reports of the Mechanicsville situation. A security admin spotted my query in an audit log, and my wrist got slapped. I wasn’t on the approved list of people to be accessing such a sensitive matter.
Too late: I had already clicked through to long lists of annotated RFID transactions associated with the investigation. I had glanced at a few, and one I couldn’t get out of my mind: the tires of a parent’s SUV, recorded by a Wave-N-Go pump at a Mechanicsville gas station. There was no record of a purchase, as though the stop had been for directions or a bio-break.
Clearly, the gas-station chain was providing company data to the feds. Was such surveillance illegal? Unethical? Creepy? Was this different than flight records, which, since 9/11, few expected to remain private?
I was still wrestling with those questions when I noticed: One of the chains providing RFID data to the HSB was Big Bob’s.
I was more facing my TV than watching it when the last puzzle piece fell into place. Had I been paying attention, I would have simply zapped the commercial. The ad did not even penetrate my consciousness until well into the next segment of sitcom. If my TiVo thought it strange that I backed up to re-screen a commercial, it did not comment.
The ad was for a high-end washing machine. Accompanying a close-up of a red sock atop a mound of pink underwear, the voiceover declared, “Make such tragic accidents a thing of the past.” I froze the frame. It would indeed be great if my red socks and my tidy whities declared themselves to my washer. What was decidedly not great was the sudden epiphany that my socks and undies were likely announcing my presence to every RFID scanner I passed. As in: every big store I entered; every subway turnstile I passed, even if I’d bought my fare card with cash; every Wave-N-Go gas pump . . .
Feeling stupid—why had I compartmentalized the RFID-in-clothing problem as purely an in-the-lab issue?—I unearthed my homebrew scanner from its place of exile at the bottom of a desk drawer.
The newer half my wardrobe had RFID tags. My wallet was filled with them.
If you have not yet joined a currency exchange, you should.
In much simpler times, people worried that newfangled credit cards were an invasion of privacy. There would be centralized records, somewhere, of what you bought when. People who worried about such records—some of them, obviously, Doing Bad Things—would use only cash.
Surely you’ve heard about the supposed nutcases who wear tinfoil-lined hats to hide their thoughts from the aliens. Well, my wallet is now foil-lined. New Euro notes carried embedded RFID tags as long ago as 2005; for several years now, new US currency shared that “honor”—to prevent counterfeiting. Here’s what they don’t tell you: You can be traced by the money in your pocket. Each bill in your wallet was associated with you when you received it at the bank lobby or ATM or in change at a store. It stays associated with you until a bank or store cash register logs its receipt. Tagged bills mean that even buying things with cash is no longer anonymous.
Are you still wondering about currency exchanges? That’s a bunch of folks who meet for the sole purpose of swapping their cash. You can do it out in the countryside somewhere, far from any possible RFID poller, although there are obvious risks to carrying large sums of cash to an isolated rendezvous. A better solution is a shielded room (in technical terms, a “Faraday cage”). Copper window scr
eening works nicely, as long as you remember to cover the floor, ceiling, and door, too. RFID interrogation signals can no more get in than microwaves can get out past the similar mesh embedded in the glass of microwave oven doors.
Click here for plans to build your own currency exchange.
RFID chips are tiny. RFID tags generally are not, because the antennae must capture enough power to operate the silicon chip. The typical antenna occupies a couple square inches. That means you can find—and disable—the tags. After I calmed down from my red-sock epiphany, that’s just what I did. If my story has made any impression on you, you will, too. I used a scanner to look for them; if you lack access to a scanner, pay close attention to big labels, overlapping fabric, and wide hems. If a garment crinkles, check there between cloth layers.
Shoes are harder. Taking them apart to find the tags that are almost certainly there will probably destroy your footwear. I zapped mine with a focused microwave beam until their chips fried. A bit of shoe polish covered the resulting scorch marks. (You might be able to microwave your shoes, but I don’t recommend it—especially if they have steel shanks.)
You may be asking: Why? Why did I disable the RFID tags in my clothes?
No one had cause to be tracking me. Maybe that was my reason. That the tags helped retailers manage their inventory was no reason for me to be marked like a prospectively wayward cat. I was offended, damn it. Sitting in my newly RFID-free apartment, stewing in high principle, paranoia, and self-righteousness, my thoughts turned to the tires that had led HSB to Mechanicsville. Outside I went.
My car, it turned out, was filled with RFIDs, and not only in its tires and the E-Zpass transponder clipped to the sun visor. Even if I could take the car apart, some pieces were likely unzappable.