by Jerry
Which left what?
I could replace my car with a clunker too old to contain RFIDs. I could, in theory, keep a clunker running with old parts from junk yards. My suspicions were by then in full bloom. I found myself wondering why the NHTSA had suddenly decided a few years earlier that tires had an aging mechanism (Tire Expiration Dates) distinct from tread wear. Was age-related rubber deterioration real, or was it disinformation to get RFID-tagged tires onto every car in the country? Frying an RFID embedded in a tire would soften the surrounding rubber. That couldn’t be good.
You’re overreacting, I had lectured myself. Three-hundred million Americans and almost as many vehicles, evermore tags on each, every day passing within range of, well, I had no idea how many RFID-sensing toll booths and point-of-sale terminals. How could HSB possibly keep up with that data geyser? They would have to concentrate on small subsets already known for some reason, by some conventional investigative means, to merit scrutiny.
Wouldn’t they?
Perhaps you are enrolled in one or more merchant loyalty programs. Knowing what you buy, and when, and where, has value. That’s why so many stores (but not mom & pop) discontinued coupons in their newspaper ads, but happily provide discounts once you disclose your customer ID. You regularly buy canned soup, so it seems harmless when they tempt you at the checkout with a deal on crackers. The results can be both humorous and off-putting when your favorite bookseller makes recommendations for you extrapolated not only from what you read, but from the gifts you’ve purchased for your quirkiest friends and relatives. It gets downright creepy when your pharmacist speculates from your prescriptions that, for example, you have a likelihood of erectile dysfunction, and mails you a Viagra coupon and the advice you discuss it with your doctor.
Those are trivial examples of data mining. Remember Dad and his disdain for economists? Economists predicted recessions by mining data long before that term came into vogue. Their models, of ever-growing sophistication and ever more voracious appetites for data, hunted for correlations, trends, and clustering. But correlation is different than causation, which is how they predicted nine of the past five recessions. These flawed readings of the economic entrails and commercial tea leaves—they’re almost funny until misinformed government policy ensues.
Data mining is a big deal now in homeland security, and rightly so. Way back in the Cold War, West German federal police broke the infamous Baader Meinhof gang by hunting for prime suspects: single men without cars registered to their names, who paid their apartment rent and utility bills in cash. Estimates vary, but the federal police may have surveilled, by emergent techniques not yet called data mining, up to five percent of the adult West German population.
Data mining can be powerful and productive. It’s a good thing when phone-call patterns give warning of an imminent terrorist strike. But when HSB—and I speak now of former colleagues who are honest and honorable people, who in my mind, notwithstanding my current fugitive status, I consider my friends—detects nine of the next five terrorist attacks?
That’s how you get a Mechanicsville.
The red-sock incident happened on a Saturday. The following Monday I had a DBA shift, filling in for my still-vacationing colleague. Feeling a bit like Marcel St. Clair, I did a few “Is it still running?” checks of CDW.
Sturgeon’s Law posits that ninety percent of everything is crap. Either Sturgeon was a cockeyed optimist, or he knew nothing about software. The data warehouse required constant babying, reconfiguring, tuning, restarting . . . pick your euphemism for “fixing.” Driving the process was a mix of recurrent and ad hoc queries, by which to gauge how well the temperamental software was behaving that day. In the ad hoc category, I queried with a few presumably innocent product RFIDs I’d recently captured with my scanner: tires on a friend’s car, a second cousin’s new penny loafers, a case of beer in the storeroom of the bistro where I had eaten dinner the previous night. I thought nothing of the gaggle of feds clustered across the lab at one of the security administration workstations. Secadmins are a breed onto themselves; it is their nature, like birds, to flock.
I was staring at the screen in frozen disbelief, at a column of time-tagged hits that tracked my buddy’s car around town yesterday, when an HSB guy—the gun-toting, agent type—sauntered over and tapped my shoulder. “A word to the wise, Zach. Checking out your friends and neighbors is not allowed either.”
I went outside for lunch that day, and never came back.
Which brings us to the end of my cautionary tale. If I am not simply deluding myself, if this blog has a readership beyond seething HSB agents, we may even be, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, at the end of the beginning.
That is all very metaphorical, of course. I am going to be very vague about where, physically, I am. While I am being metaphorical, I will go so far as to admit a return to my roots. I am toiling once again at a mom & pop store. It’s someplace that pays me in cash, and that—like my Mom’s & Dad’s place—still uses those quaint, low-tech devices which, although called “cash registers,” register no information about the currency therein.
To anyone from HSB viewing this: Maybe it’s a grocery. Of course, it could as easily be a dry cleaner, a hotdog stand, or a used-book store. Perhaps it’s none of those.
In short, my hypothetical Dear Reader, I’ve gone underground. The Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list calls me a cyber-terrorist.
HSB now claims I’ve hacked into the transactional databases of American companies. Not so. At worst, I’ve grazed the database of one company, Big Bob’s. In my opinion, that hardly rises to most-wanted status.
HSB would also have you believe I brazenly engaged in a nefarious spying operation from within the bowels of JAB itself. Once again: not so. I’ll admit—I have admitted—to a few peeks. I’ll assert every DBA and sysadmin there does the same. Vigilance in the search for bugs in crappy, overpriced software is no vice.
Why, then, is HSB after me?
It all keeps coming around to Big Bob’s. You’ve already read my after-the-fact reasoning (rationalizing, if you prefer) about the field trips to Big Bob’s that brought me to HSB’s attention. But the friend’s tires that surfaced in the CDW, just before I went to lunch and never returned, were bought at Big Bob’s. By inference, Big Bob’s provided the data to HSB. Who else could tie those specific tires to that friend? Not that Big Bob’s alone could possibly have had enough RFID readers, widely enough dispersed, to have captured the peripatetic course around town of those tires . . .
The quicker I am taken into custody, the sooner this narrative, in its many reincarnations and mirror sites on offshore servers, stops. HSB does not want to reveal its plans—devised, I will postulate, with only the best of intentions—to track everyone, everywhere, at any time. They want at all costs to keep secret the clandestine co-opting of Big Bob’s, and countless other retailers, into Big Brother.
I keep remembering that agent’s “friendly” advice. CDW had associated me with my second cousin from across town and the college buddy with whom, at the last minute, I had gone to dinner. My query had been enough to trigger a real-time alert at a secadmin workstation.
Many of you are thinking: HSB has no reason to watch me. I’ve done nothing wrong.
I’m relating this story to make you consider one central fact: I did nothing wrong, either.
What you do now is your choice. My free advice: Join a currency exchange. Trade shopping lists with your friends. Pay with cash, and patronize stores with old registers. Carry your purchases in a foil-lined shopping bag. Remove those RFID tags that are safely removable.
But if you want to do more . . . I have a new calling, and the spare time to indulge it: very specialized circuit design. I’ve concentrated on gadgets for all things RFID:
detecting
spoofing
jamming
frying
The frequencies used by RFIDs are unlicensed, making my hobby (except perhaps when zapping others’ chi
ps) entirely legal.
What these devices have in common is the long-term effect of their deployment. Widely used, they will degrade databases reliant on RFID-based tracking. If you believe that following your every move and viewing your every purchase should be more difficult than typing a simple query into a government database—if you place any value on your privacy—such degradation is a good thing.
Perhaps you have the skills and equipment to make these devices. Any savvy teen with access to a modern high-school electronics shop can build them. And they offer a productive new use for that old, wireless PDA that hasn’t seen the light of day in months ;-)
Check back often for updated designs.
I’ve put on indefinite hold my dream that a robot of my design to roll onto Mars or Titan. My robotic aspirations have been repurposed toward a different world: the RFIDsphere. Imagine armies of tiny RFID spoofers and jammers set loose to roam, to mimic codes they encounter, and to inject RFID gremlins throughout their random travels.
How polluted must the data sources for repositories like CDW become before we’re all freed from incessant surveillance?
Herewith two parting comments for my friends at the Homeland Security Bureau, and especially to those of you on the hunt for me. First, you have not heard the last of The Rogue. Second . . .
Tag. You’re it.
HOTEL SECURITY
Carl Frederick
The petard you’re hoist by may be your own . . .
“M AG card or retinal scan?” said the hotel night clerk. “Or both if you want to give a key to a visitor.”
Roger Royce glanced at the scanner and forced a smile. “Scanner,” he said. “Left eye.”
“Oh,” said the clerk, a look of surprise on his face. “You’ve done this before.” He pushed a button and the scanner swiveled out to the front of the reservations desk. “Almost everyone chooses the card.” As Roger leaned in, his left eye over the metal guide, the clerk added, “People seem almost afraid of this thing.”
“I have reservations about this,” said Roger, “but scanners are the way of the future.” His smile edged toward a scowl. Although he much preferred the mag card, he was duty bound to choose the scanner. After all, it was probably because of him that the hotel even had a scanner.
A flash came from the lens and Roger then bent to pick up his overnight bag and laptop.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the clerk. “But I need to see a photo ID, please.”
Roger put down his baggage and took out his wallet. His hand hesitated over his driver’s license before withdrawing instead, a phony ID. Performing a spur of the moment test, Roger handed the ‘Eastern Lycanthropic’ identification card to the clerk.
The clerk glanced at it and passed it back. “Thank you, Dr. Royce. Your room number is 2217. Shall I write it down?”
“No thank you.” Roger picked up his bags.
“Enjoy your stay at the Neotel Riverside,” said the clerk. “Have a good night.”
Roger bit his lip for a moment before saying, ‘Thank you’ and then heading toward the elevator. He’d considered apprising the clerk of the lapse of security but decided there was no need to make an issue of it and embarrass the man. Roger smiled, thinking that the encounter would make a good opening anecdote for his speech in the morning.
As he walked, Roger noticed the announcement monitor showing the next day’s events. He grimaced as he read the first entry.
National Hotel Security Conference
9:00 A.M. Galaxy Room
Breakfast Keynote Speech
Dr. Roger Royce—Chief Scientist,
Hotel Security International
“Hotels—The First Line of,
Defense against Terrorists”
Waiting at the elevators, he took a long glance around the lobby. This was the first time he’d stayed at a Neotel. But except for the retinal scanner, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly ‘neo’ about it. At least nothing that could be seen. He did know that it had the very latest security system. He had designed some of it.
The elevator came, rose, and deposited him on the twenty-second floor. Only then did he note that he’d forgotten his room number. It would be embarrassing to return to the reservation desk, so he spent the next couple of minutes eyeing each of the doors until a retinal lock displayed green. With a sigh of relief, he felt the door handle engage. A light came on as Roger walked into his hotel room.
“Welcome to your room,” came a cheerful voice from a dressing table. “I am your information butler.”—Roger, smiling, shook his head and set his bags on the desk—“Just pick up the phone and push the ‘Information Butler’ button—and I’ll be there to assist you.”
The wall color changed and, after a few seconds, changed again. Then the walls ran through a rainbow of colors.
Roger watched, speechless. He’d known these technologies existed, but had never stayed at a hotel employing them.
“Neotel provides user-configurable accommodations,” said the voice. The room reverted to its original beige hue. “You can use the touch panel by the window to change the wall colors, or simply ask me to change them for you.”
The picture on the wall then exhibited the same instability—changing from a landscape to a tiger to The Mona Lisa then finally to a view of The White House. “You can use the panel under the picture, or just ask me. I can even help you upload images from your laptop or from many brands of cell phones.”
Music began to play but Roger couldn’t tell where the sound came from.
“And music, of course,” said the Information Butler. The 1812 Overture gave way to Pachelbel’s Canon and then to silence. “And for a small fee, you can even specify a scent. Maybe fresh-cut grass, or salt water over craggy rocks. Just pick up the phone and push ‘Information Butler’.” After a pause of about a second, the voice from the dressing table said, “There are no better accommodations to be had than at a Neotel. We are the best!”
“Oh, vanity!” said Roger, lightly. “I’m accustomed to more modest accommodations.”
Roger smiled. The place did have its geeky pleasures. In the morning, he intended to try some of the ‘user configurable’ toys. But now, he was too tired. He stripped down and headed for the bathroom. If the toilet talks to me, I’ll probably lose it.
A few minutes later, ready for bed, he pulled back the covers and flopped down prone on the sheets. The sheets weren’t hotel-room cold; the bed was obviously pre-warmed. Roger tap-switched off the light and gave a sigh of relaxation.
“Hi there,” came a voice from deep within the bed.
Roger rolled over, sharply and sat upright. “What!”
“I am your model SSC-IB2 Intelligent Bed from Sleepsmarts Corporation.”
“You’re kidding,” said Roger.
“No, not at all,” said the bed. “Is the mattress to your liking? I can make it harder or softer.”
“Good grief,” said Roger, “This is real AI with voice recognition.”
“Indeed, I am.” The bed’s voice was mellow and soothing. “Is the mattress to your desired firmness?”
“I’d like it a little firmer,” said Roger, less interested in his mattress than in testing the limits of the bed’s language processing.
“Be so good as to lie down,” said the bed. “That makes for a more accurate adjustment.”
“How do you know I’m not lying down?”
“There are pressure sensors throughout the mattress. It is an active mattress, accommodating to your movements during the night.”
“Fine, then.” Roger stretched out with his nose on the pillow. “Make it firmer,” he said, wondering if the bed could understand him in spite of his voice being muffled by the pillow.
“Just say stop,” said the bed, “when it is optimally comfortable.”
“Oh, stop,” said Roger after a few moments. “This is perfect.”
“Glad to be of service.”
Roger pulled the covers over him. “Good night, be
d.”
“Good night.”
A few moments later, Roger rolled over onto his side and reached for the phone. “Rats!” he said. “I always forget to ask for a wakeup call.”
“I can do that,” said the bed. “What time do you wish to be awakened?”
“What? Oh. Six o’clock, please.”
“Wakeup call at six, sharp,” said the bed. “Good night.”
“Good night,” said Roger, “and thanks.” He shook his head against the pillow. What am I doing? Being polite to a simple AI—well, maybe not exactly simple.
Roger spent a fitful few hours. Not even the comfort of the SSC-IB2 Intelligent Bed had made sleep less elusive than it had been of late.
He rolled over and glanced at the clock radio. “Oh no,” he said. “Only two in the morning.”
“What’s wrong, sir?” said the bed.
Forgetting where he was for an instant, Roger started. “What?”
“Do you need medical assistance? I heard you groaning in your sleep.”
Memory having returned, Roger relaxed. “No. No, I’m fine.” Then he sat up. “You said ‘sir’. How did you know I was male?”
“From profiling. Your weight is 182 pounds and I estimate your height at five feet, ten inches. And during the course of your motions during sleep, the mattress sensors detected determining features of your anatomy. By the way, your Body Mass Index is 26.1.”
“Oh gosh.” Roger plopped down on the sheets. “It’s the stress. I’m putting on weight.” He bit his lower lip. I’m doing it again; I’m explaining myself to a talking bed.
“There’s a good health club at this hotel.” The bed’s voice sounded eager. “You could work off those pounds. The club is free during your stay. And the yearly membership fee for non-guests is quite reasonable—or so I’ve been instructed to say.”
“No. I’m just not sleeping well.”
“I am very sad to hear that,” said the bed.
Roger smiled. “Sad? How can an AI be sad?”