The RFID Reader

With the federal government planning to implement RFID tagging within passport, a RFID chip vendor On Track Innovations has been given the “green light” by the court to resume testing RFID chips, as a provider of this technology, after the company issued a lawsuit.

The New Jersey based company will continue were it previously left off testing the RFID chips, after the Government’s Printing Office rejected On Track Innovations’ technology to produce the chips
In the beginning a hand full of vendors were selected to test and produce the chips, and On Track Innovations was not one of them. However, the federal government decided to reconsider some of the rejected vendors, and On Track Innovations was once again considered and discarded. . The company sued the GPO in small claims court and was given permission to test their RFID chip technology.

Many analysts are still concerned that the use of RFID enabled passports will give the government the ability to spy on its citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today that it will start testing passports that contain RFID tags.

These RFID enabled passports have already been in use by other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. The DHS plans to try these new passports at the San Francisco airport, where it will become the second airport, after Los Angeles International Airport, to test these new passports.

The DHS plans to have all passports embedded with RFID technology that has the person’s private records and digital photograph by October 2006.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that it will support having RFID technology implemented to tag and track “baggage-loaders, fueling trucks, and other maintenance vehicles.”

This announcement came after it conducted a trial at the Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. Four million dollars has been allotted to fund this trial project that is being completed at Newark. However, the trial project there only uses RFID to track 80 vehicles, while a concurrent project at JAXPORT in Florida is using RFID to track baggage.

The vehicles in Newark are being monitored by equipment provided by I.D. Systems. I.D. Systems’ gateways were joined to nodes on a network located around the airport. Based on this, someone driving a vehicle could be tracked when the RFID Vehicle Assisted Communicator, linked to a GPS unit, transmitted a 900 MHz signal to the gateway.