RFID Foes Find Righteous Ally 

By Mark Baard

02:00 AM Jul. 14, 2005 PT

Privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht, an opponent of the use of radio
tags on consumer goods and in ID documents, is a woman any X-Files 
fan could love.

She's youthful-looking and attractive, with fair skin and cherry-
blonde hair. A former schoolteacher, Albrecht also has a master's
degree from Harvard, where she is completing a doctoral degree. 

Albrecht is suspicious of the government and big business. She's been
an electrifying guest on Coast to Coast AM, the cult radio show
featuring talk about aliens, ghosts, conspiracies and cryptozoology.

As director of the consumer privacy group Caspian, Albrecht is a
darling of the mainstream news media too. In hundreds of interviews,
in a list of publications that includes Business Week and Times of
London, she has warned of privacy risks posed by RFID tags, the radio
devices that retailers plan to use as a replacement for bar-code
labels.

Albrecht fears that retailers will match the data emitted by the tags
with their customers' information, turning each tag into a potential
tracking beacon. She also suspects the government will want access to
the retailers' RFID databases.

But one aspect of Albrecht's anti-RFID crusade has been attracting a
lot of attention from other privacy groups: her religious beliefs.

Albrecht does not often discuss her religious views with reporters.
But she believes that RFID technology may be part of the fulfillment
of the Mark of the Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

Other privacy rights advocates want Albrecht to help them connect with
Christians who believe that RFID tags -- tiny chips that emit serial
numbers -- are the Mark of the Beast. Many of those Christians believe
humans one day will be compelled to bear a mark on their heads or
wrists, to engage in the buying and selling of goods.

"Sometimes, it's as if they are saying, 'Hooray, we've got one (a
Christian) in our midst,'" said Albrecht. "'Maybe she can tell us what
to do.'"

Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate, and Lee Tien, senior staff attorney
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are among those who have talked
to Albrecht about reaching out to Christians who take parts of the
Bible literally.

"Many of us in the mainstream privacy community," said Tien, "don't
know how to reach out to (the Christian community)."

Albrecht is already reaching at least a few of her fellow Christians,
through videos produced by Endtime Ministries, that link RFID to the
Book of Revelation.

"The Mark of the Beast, 666: a prophesy from 2000 years ago," says
Albrecht, at the beginning of her video, On the Brink of the Mark,
produced two years ago. "How many people (know that) technological
developments of the last 10 to 20 years could be combining to make 
the Mark of the Beast a reality, and possibly even in our lifetimes?" 

[...]

Full article at "Wired News" ...
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68133,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3


* CASPIAN - Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering 
  http://www.nocards.org/news/index.shtml

Cheers, Steve..

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