Spy chips for LA jails
p2pnet.net News:- Jailbirds in the Los Angeles won’t be able to take flight without the authorities being instantly alerted.
That’s because they’ll be banded with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) spy bracelets.
“The country’s largest jail system has launched a pilot project with Alanco Technologies to track inmates using the technology,” says CNET News.
Phase I will involve setting up an RFID system in the 1,800-inmate east facility of the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, California, by this fall, says the story, adding:
“Alanco estimates that the prison system alone could become a billion-dollar market, while jails could account for $500 million to $700 million in revenue.”
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See:-
CNET News – L.A. County jail tags inmates with RFID, May 17, 2005
May 18th, 2005 at 1:29 am
The RFID signal is blocked by many common metals.
So it’s not any use outside, or even inside controlled environments.
Another case of the snake oil merchant.
There’s a sucker born every second.
May 18th, 2005 at 6:18 am
Exactly. So the system would probly be set up to try and query all the chips at regular or random intervals. If any chip failed to respond an alert would be triggered.
All the prison would have to do is ensure they’ve got transceivers in places where signal reception might be blocked by walls or whatever. As soon as someone goes outside their area the alarm sounds. If it’s setup properly you could probly have indidividual profiles, so certain ppl would be allowed in one area and not another, and vice versa for others.
But yeah, all it would take is for someone to wear 2 bracelets around and the system would just think the 2 ppl are together or near each other. They’ll still need to rely on all their existing methods, this will simply add another option.
May 18th, 2005 at 10:03 am
It’s not quite snake oil mind you, but it’s not so foolproof as they present it.
It would probably be of no use OUTSIDE, but INSIDE one could be punished severely for “shielding” an RFID device.
By having an inmate’s RFID constantly “pinging”, one could keep track of wherever he is in the facility, weather the inmate is in a restricted facility, or if god forbid he’s “making a break for it”. It would not be inhumanly invasive, but by having an RFID continuously linked with and tracked by a central mainframe it does ease a prison staff’s burdon in tracking thousands of inmates. Think “deadlock” but without the lethality.
Fortunately for us normal humans, such a scheme could only work in a penal colony type environment where people are under legal penalties which rob them of what would be normal constitutional rights.