Time, Place, And Identity

How Artists And Engineers Are Evolving With RFID Technology

By Joe Baio

The scene:

7:30PM, April 26,2006: rxGallery, San Francisco, Calif.

"It was difficult to find a doctor to help with the implantation,” says Mikey Sklar over the sound of electronic music bellowing from the video projected behind him. The bass is keeping perfect time with the spliced together time-lapsed photos flickering on the screen.

Behind Sklar's dreadlocks, the RFID implantation process has begun. A sterile pad is spread on a small kitchen table. Sklar's hand enters the frame and rests on the pad. A pair of latex clad hands suddenly appears above Sklar's. Immediately they start spreading iodine and ELA-Max/L.M.X 4% numbing cream over the webbing between Sklar's thumb and index finger. The camera abruptly changes its angle and a hypodermic needle appears in one of the latex hands. A 1% lidocane solution is administered to Sklar's webbing. The needle is quickly replaced with a scalpel and a small incision is created right above Sklar's thumb. The camera suddenly pans around. One latex hand is now grasping what looks like a plastic cap gun with a large gauge needle in place of a barrel. This is no cap gun, it's a Jecta veterinary electronic ID implanter preloaded with a Q5 EM4102 RFID tag. The tip of the gun slides into Sklar's incision and the latex hand compresses the trigger sending Q5 EM4102 tag straight into Sklar's hand.

Close-ups of sutures follow and then the video ends. The artists and engineers assembled in this small bar nervously sip their cocktails. Sklar looks out at the dark end of the room and asks, "Any questions?”

Hands fly up.

People don't realize it, but most of us regularly carry around an RFID (radio frequency identification) tag, just not a Q5 EM4102 implanted within our hands. Instead they are the cardkeys that hang around our necks, our passports, the tags on the shirt we are currently wearing, or that credit card in our wallets.

We nonchalantly wave our cardkeys and credit cards across a reader not fully realizing that our identity, the time, and location are all recorded. Microseconds after the scan, the reader checks a database and looks to see if this RFID tag has access to this particular area or bank account. If the RFID is registered, access is magically granted.

The device within Sklar's hand and our cardkeys are both examples of passive RFID tags. Within each tag is a small, flat, and coiled integrated circuit. Most resemble the two-dimensional mazes that fill the backs of cereal boxes. These passive tags lay dormant until they come into contact with a RF signal (a tiny packet of energy) emitted by a reader. Then a small electrical signal is induced by the RF wave. The coiled circuit abruptly powers up and transmits a response.

Sklar's implantation demonstration ended with a list of 16 others that have also implanted RFID devices. He describes his fellow implantees as midnight engineers, men and women that find themselves inside garages tinkering with gadgets late into the night. Amal: an EM4201 implanted into the webbing of his right hand. Jamesbeat: EM4201 embedded in the right wrist. Jonas Inborg: histag-s2048 in the thumb. Just to name a few. Most of the implanters' have hacked together Rube Goldbergesque keyless entry systems to their cars, houses, and computers.

The first application of Sklar's tag was a safety on/off mechanism for his large flame-shooting trampoline, called the High-Lighter. On the bottom of this trampoline is an ultrasonic sensor that measures the changes in height of the trampoline canvas. These changes are then transmitted to a control valve regulating a tank full of liquid propane. Large displacements of the trampoline open the valve, releasing propane, which is then ignited in a nearby torch. The valve mechanism feeding the torch remains inactive until Sklar switches it on with is RFID tag.

Browsing through the implanters' websites and blogs, one theme consistently jumps out of their writing. All of these midnight engineers seem to be implanting chips within themselves without a clear venue of application. They all seem to agree that RFID use around the globe is increasing exponentially. Therefore, they are just hoping to explore, first hand, the limitations and dangers of the technology on the horizon.

2:00PM, May 8, 2008: Room 405, Paul Allen Center, University of Washington, Seattle.

Inside the office of Evan Welbourne, the graduate student leading the University of Washington's RFID Ecosystem, are rolls and rolls of RFID tags. They sit idly on shelves patiently waiting for registration and deployment. Their shapes and sizes all vary and remind me of rolls of lollipops. Welbourne claims that the tags shaped liked crossed daggers work best. But at 50 cents apiece they are also the most expensive.

This cheapness factor has led to the rapid deployment of RFID tags. Corporations, libraries, and pet owners commonly keep tabs on shipments of goods, books and Fido via RFID. Nonetheless, this widespread deployment has worried some. A quick Google search will return a plethora of people wearing aluminum foil hats spouting off negative RFID rants. Most of them revolve around potential human tracking capabilities. Complaints run the gambit from, "the RFID tag in my passport or drivers license will allow the government to track my every move” to "I am worried my husband could catch me sleeping around.”

Anticipating these worries, in 2001, the National Research Council published a 215 page report entitled, "Embedded Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers.” The report was composed of a panel of academicians and engineers representing a cross-section of U.S. universities and corporations. One panel member, UW professor Gaetano Borriello, also happens to be Welbourne's thesis advisor. Within the pages of this report are a series of recommendations and predictions of the future state of research based on embedded technologies. It predicts that these technologies, "will become an essential part of the fabric of everyday life. In the same way that people often assume that electric power and telephone service will be available, they will assume the availability and properly functioning of EmNets(imbedded networked chips). But in contrast EmNets will be deployed in situ, often without the dedicated expert service and maintenance associated with utilities, making the trustworthiness of EmNets triply difficult.”

RFID Ecosystem

Walking through the halls of the Paul Allen center, which also doubles as the testing grounds for the UW RFID Ecosystem, you will notice white boxes lining the ceiling. These are the RFID antennas which collect data for the project.

Within the Ecosystem, professors and students are issued RFID tags to wear or stuff inside backpacks. Readers are deployed throughout the building recording times, positions, and identities, which are then placed into a database by Welbourne and his coworkers. "This actually happens automatically over secure network connections and in accordance with several policies on privacy and access control,” emphasizes Welbourne.

There are 185 of these antennas deployed around the building. Each group of four is wired to an EPC-GEN2 RFID reader and supports a read range of up to 160 ft in ideal conditions. Much more firepower than what is necessary to track the hundreds of deployed passive tags wandering around the building.

"Some volunteers tend to forget that they are wearing a tag,” says Karl Koscher, another graduate student in the lab, "that is, until they misplaced their tagged backpack and login to track it down.”

As a demonstration, Koscher leaves the room and proceeds down the hall. From the computer monitor in front of Welbourne we track Koscher's digital self-wander around the electronic map of the floor, a human take on the ant farm. We watch as Koscher stops in front of other doorways, passes other tags in the hall, and then finally returns. Then with a few keystrokes Welbourne opens a table, time and position data from one of the RFID tags Welbourne carries. These are the data that scare the aluminum foil hat folks. However, within the Ecosystem, volunteers are allowed to specify what other users have access to this data and can periodically delete it using a secure web interface.

The first application to evolve out of the Ecosystem is the real time microblogging tool called RFIDDER (pronounced ‘friter'). With RFIDDER, events collected within the Ecosystem can immediately be published to your social network. "Tom just entered the 4th floor computer lab” or "Seminar just ended” can be sent to a web-based digital log or even to a friend's mobile phone.

"No one has freaked out,” claims Welbourne. Yet, now a year from the initial deployment, Welbourne and coworkers are still unsure about all of the potential applications or privacy issues they will eventually stumble upon. Though, Welbourne makes it clear that he believes major positive aspects of an RFID-laden world will be able to overcome the massive amount of privacy hurdles that potentially exist.

Still, if researchers are still unsure about all the negative aspects of an RFID future, than are those skeptics toting aluminum foil hats really that looney? What scary privacy issues are looming in the future? Currently, it seems like it's anybody's guess and yet, artists and engineers seem to be enjoying the ride.

Joe Baio is a Ph.D. student in Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington.

Video tour of the UW RFID Ecosystem:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxZzDMQ7D4A]

Video: E. Welbourne