Warning - Biometric passport tracking

[Bulletproof Monk]

Biometric passports with RFID chips carry supplemental information about the bearer, in a digitised form. These passports have already been introduced many years ago in Malaysia and more recently in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Sweden, United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, the Republic of Ireland and Poland.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is an object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radio waves. Chip-based RFID tags contain silicon chips and antennas. Passive tags require no internal power source, whereas active tags require a power source

Although RFID tags are only officially intended for short-distance use, they can be interrogated from greater distances by anyone with a high-gain antenna, potentially allowing the contents of a house to be scanned at a distance, something distinctly Orwellian in nature.

Because of this, whenever RFID tags are near to readers, the distance at which a tag's signal can be eavesdropped is irrelevant; what counts is the distance at which the much more powerful reader can be received. Just how far this can be depends on the type of the reader, but in the extreme case some readers have a maximum power output of 4 W, enabling signals to be received from tens of kilometres away.

Various methods can be used to protect against RFID data interception[5]:
• One can prevent the RFID transponders from receiving power. This is accomplished by obstructing the power supply; one approach is to shield the RFID transponders in a Faraday's cage, intercepting the electromagnetic signal which normally powers them. For RFIDs which couple magnetically, the shield requires a housing of magnetically permeable material such as iron or MU-metal.
• One can simply damage the antenna. With larger RFID transponders one can recognize the spirals of the antenna clearly by use of a radiograph. If one splits the antenna circuit, the RFID transponder can no longer function.
• An intense electromagnetic impulse applied to the transponders and antenna can induce high currents, interrupting the circuit and rendering the tag useless.
• The system can be blocked by sending a spurious signal in conjunction with the inquiry signal, preferably on the RFID frequency. This blocks the relatively weak signals of the RFID transponder.
• If a simple memory chip is used to confirm the authenticity of the inquiry, then one can record the inquiry and at a later time reverse engineer the signal, allowing replication. For the reader it appears as if the correct RFID transponder were in the field. Modern RFID tags using UHF Class 1 gene 2 developed by the European Working Group of EPCglobal Inc., which protect against such replay attacks by using more complex encodings.
• Many RFID tags include a built in 'kill' function. When provided with the correct pass-code can be either reprogrammed or told to 'self destruct', rendering it useless.

Bulletproof

Maybe get yourself one of those photographic lead lined bags and keep it in there......that's what I do.