Boston: Nuke target and breakaway state capital

Posted on February 14, 2009 by Mark Baard

In a bizarre piece of uncredited fiction at the Telegraph, the U.S. becomes a fascist police state, and Boston is targeted by a “false flag” terrorist attack set-up by the federal government.

I guess I should be glad I got my speeding ticket yesterday (on the Jamaicaway, and what a whopper it was).

Next time, the police might be permitted to open fire on any suspicious vehicle…

Cryptogon’s covering Operation Blackjack, and notes the striking use of symbology in the online comic:

Remember the Kingstar (controlled demolition company) van near the exploded bus on the 7/7 London bomings? That’s what came to mind for me.

Also, the ‘fictitious’ attack occurs during the Summer solstice. What’s the name on the side of the van? New Dawn Presentations. And its logo? That’s right, the Sun.

One other thing: All the cool kids know that the Illuminati are fascinated with Ferris wheels near bodies of water. (Look, don’t blame me, I just work here.)

via cryptogon.com » Archives » Operation Blackjack: The Story of Terrorist Nuclear Attacks on Major Western Cities.

Google + P&G = RFID + data mining

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Mark Baard

Parallelnormal is not encouraged by the companies’ new innovation-idea-swapping agreement.

All in it together. CC/Kenneth Lu

This item (excerpt, link, below) is about more than a cross-cultural exchange between two of the largest data-gathering giants on Earth.

I say, welcome to the Internet of Things. P&G wants all of its goods to bear RFID tags, which for the first time will match each of us to the individual items we purchase with credit or customer loyalty cards.

Google is also already in the locative business, through Google Flu Trends, and as the co-investor (with former CIA, Bechtel and Bin Laden family officials) in a company deploying a wireless grid over San Francisco.

Now, imagine a search engine, accessible to government agencies only, which could light-up a Google Earth map with everything you ever paid for, anywhere on the planet.

At Procter & Gamble Co., the corporate culture is so rigid, employees jokingly call themselves “Proctoids.” In contrast, Google Inc. staffers are urged to wander the halls on company-provided scooters and brainstorm on public whiteboards.

Now, this odd couple thinks they have something to gain from one another — so they’ve started swapping employees. So far, about two-dozen staffers from the two companies have spent weeks dipping into each other’s staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. The initiative has drawn little notice. Previously, neither company had granted this kind of access to outsiders.

via Media Info Center

Charge cards give way to RFID phones

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Mark Baard

Photo: Courtesy of MasterCard

From my Boston Globe column this week, MasterCard says any bank can now issue computer codes, rather than cards, to consumers.–mb

I usually tap my RFID-chipped Citizens Bank card against the checkout reader to streamline the transaction. Once I’ve fished the card out of my wallet, and then out of its Identity Stronghold spy-blocking sleeve, that is.

Soon, I will not have to open my wallet: MasterCard-issuing banks can now set up their customer’s RFID phones to make wireless purchases at retailers with RFID readers.

via Headset takes calls from real world, too – The Boston Globe

I was a government guinea pig, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Posted on September 7, 2008 by Mark Baard

Please read and comment at The Register!

(All in the name of medical science: Uncle Sam wants their milk, and blood, and hair, and teeth, and... Photo: CC Jake Krohn)

From The Register, here’s my report on the largest, longest and most in-depth study of children, anywhere, ever:

To understand the causes of asthma, obesity and other troubling childhood disease trends, the National Children’s Study will sample DNA and monitor the health and environmental exposures of 100,000 kids, throughout their youth, from the womb to the dorm room.

Such a huge sample will ensure that less common diseases, such as autism, are captured in the study.

To aid their hunt for lead and countless other toxins, NCS organizers in 2004 explored the use of RFID and GPS transponders, wireless motes and sensors implanted under the skin.

Read the whole article: I was a government guinea pig, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt | The Register.

Hear Alan Watt discuss the “monstrosity” of the National Children’s Study. (See the Sept. 9, 2008 entry.)

Snap! Setback for makers of RFID shield

Posted on August 28, 2008 by Mark Baard

RFID privacy sleeve-maker Identity Stronghold this week learned from NASA that the metal claps holding workers’ IDs in place can pop-out, damaging eyeballs, potentially, or delicate, space-bound computer hardware.

At least, that is NASA’s story.

Identity Stronghold founder Walt Augustinowicz tells Parallelnormal that “a NASA safety worker forcefully and incorrectly pried our badgeholder apart so he could remove the clips and then installed them backwards.”

(Sounds like NASA’s safety worker is a regular Homer J. Simpson.)

The space agency, Augustinowicz says, has only barred the shield on badges worn in a flight area clean room, where such bans are common. It might instead use another product from Identity Stronghold, which has no moving parts.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CmLsWav6-8]

NASA Security Badges are a Health and Safety Risk | Universe Today
Use of the badge holder, made by the Florida-based company Identity Stronghold, has now been suspended and a temporary clear plastic holder is being used in its place. The Stronghold design was chosen as it has an “electromagnetically opaque sleeve to prevent the card from being read at a distance and to give the user some control over when and where the card is exposed for reading,” according to the source Information Week article.

Also: See my Boston Globe writeup re: Identity Stronghold

RFID scare? Blame the media

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Mark Baard

Journalists “screw up” health story… trust business to fix the problem, says business blogger.

(RFID tags didn’t cause his heart attack. But arphids can make matters worse. Photo: Daubentonia)

from Mark

Widespread reports this week that RFID signals could kill you in the hospital are false, a technology business blogger is claiming.

The blogger, at the technology website ZNDet, makes this bogus assertion: that hundreds of news outlets are twisting the results of a disturbing Dutch finding (published by the Journal of the American Medical Association): that RFID tags and readers can cause livesaving equipment to switch off.

In fact, Vrije University researchers reported total switch-offs and other severe malfunctions in its tests of pacemakers, dialysis machines and ventilators, operated within about ten feet of RFID tags.

The ZDNet blogger, Dana Blankenhorn, employing a condescending “now let’s set the record straight” voice, ignores the central findings of the Dutch study. Instead, Blankenhorn says that hundreds of news reports, based on the JAMA report, “screw up” those facts.

Blankenhorn says a tweak in RFID standards — a process that could take nearly a decade, as today’s standards did (something he does not note) — is all that is needed to fix the EM interference problem.

But the RFID horse is already out of the gate: The tags are becoming as ubiquitous in hospital wards and operating rooms as they are on the street. (Click here for my Boston Globe report on RFID tags in hospitals.)

Lack of RFID standards leads to media panic | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com
There is a problem with RFID in hospitals. There is no standard that will tell hospitals what frequencies the tags are using. Thus they can’t tell when the frequencies being used by the tags might interfere with other gear.

This problem is very easy to fix. The industry gets together on an RFID medical standard, which specifies which frequency is to be used. My choice would be the upper range of 802.11, around 5.8 MHz. Medical devices don’t run there.

Albrecht nails cancer chip makers

Posted on June 3, 2008 by Mark Baard

Mainstream reporters helped spread VeriChip “lies,” Spychips author says

(Katherine Albrecht, the world’s most influential opponent to the use of RFID tags for tracking humans, is driving another nail into VeriChip, and its MSM dupes, for promoting subcutaneous chipping. Photo: Anne Hellmond)

from Mark:

I always tell my journalism students that objectivity should not come at the expense of the truth.

Still, many reporters appear to take the corporate suits at their word, despite compelling evidence from grassroots technology opponents (link, excerpt, below).

A simple denial from VeriChip, for example, seemed enough to balance the scales for reporters at Time Magazine, Business Week, and RFID Journal, after Albrecht told an AP reporter about animal studies strongly suggestive of a chip-cancer link.

Industry and government are fairly adept at damage control. After I wrote a Wired story about Homeland Security human tracking scheme in early 2005, the agency enlisted a computer rag hack in an attempt to discredit my original piece.

VeriChip similarly reached out to Time magazine to soften the blow of the surprising findings of cancer in animals bearing microchip implants, which Albrecht brought to light.

Albrecht believes the VeriChip might be a precursor to the Mark of the Beast described in the Book of Revelation.

Verichip Cancer Report
VeriChip’s media efforts have done little to salvage the company’s public image or its financial performance, both of which plummeted after research linking the implantable microchip to cancer was first widely revealed by the Associated Press in September 2007. The same company that once predicted revenues in the “billions” earned just $3,000 from its microchip implant operations in the first quarter of 2008, as patients shun the device that many are now calling the “cancer chip.”

Investors have also distanced themselves from the failing company, with VeriChip’s stock plummeting from a high of $10.62 last year to just over $2.00 today.

Subcutaneous RFID chips doomed

Posted on May 30, 2008 by Mark Baard

Spychips author promises to release information damaging to VeriChip

Spock and Kirk plucked subcutaneous transponders from their arms to make a bolt-cutting laser.

(In the Star Trek episode, Patterns of Force, Spock and Kirk plucked subcutaneous transponders from their arms to make a bolt-cutting laser. Image: Memory Alpha)

from Mark:

The Stanley Works, the hardware toolmaker, is paying $45 million for Verichip‘s baby tracking bracelet, Xmark, the companies announced recently.

Hospital baby snatching is exceedingly rare. But the thought of it is terrifying enough to make it a big seller. VeriChip has also pitched its RFID system as a way to track Alzheimer’s patients who wander away from their supervisors.

But Xmark was VeriChip’s only profitable division, said Spychips author Katherine Albrecht said on her TruthNet Radio program this morning.

That leaves behind a “big, gaping, vacuuming void” in the company, Albrecht said” “the investment suck of its implantable chips division.”

VeriChip’s unsuccessful implantable chip product (pictured here) will be completely doomed, Albrecht strongly suggested, when she announces damaging information about the technology Monday.

According to Albrecht, only 300 people have a VeriChip microchip implanted under their skin.

OECD to plot internet's future

Posted on May 16, 2008 by Mark Baard

Forty government ministers will meet with private business managers in Seoul next month to plan an all-reaching, all-seeing, all-knowing internet, which derives data from RFID tags and other ubiquitous sensors.

Father of the internet and Google chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf (pictured here) will be participating in the OECD meeting.

The ministers says they want to “provide guidance” to consumers as they adjust to the convergence of all media and commerce, and sensor-derived data, into a single stream.

From the program for the upcoming meeting:

The Future of the Internet Economy OECD Ministerial Meeting
The Internet is a key infrastructure for global economic growth and social development. Three major trends – Convergence, Creativity and Confidence – are influencing the policy environment for the Internet Economy. Each of these trends reflects significant shifts in the use and functionality of the Internet. Collectively, they represent a major transition in the evolution of the Internet and the economic system that has developed around it. Therefore, it has become increasingly necessary that policies supporting the Internet Economy be carefully crafted and co-ordinated across policy domains, borders and multiple stakeholder communities.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is an intergovernmental trade organization set-up to rebuild postwar Europe. It has since broadened its reach into virtually every aspect of human affairs, planet-wide.

(Images: Vint Cerf, from the ICANN website.)

RFID rats in your wheelie bins

Posted on April 15, 2008 by Mark Baard

Whew, “no worries,” Aussies. You are in good hands.

Not even you will be trusted with the spychip reports on your recycling compliance. Australian Broadcasting reports that only your government and a big fat contractor will know. (Photo: ABC News.)

Bin Brother is watching you – ABC News Australian Broadcasting Corporation

By Karen Barlow

Posted Mon Apr 14, 2008 2:26pm AEST
RFID chips allow the council to work out who is recycling and who isnt.

There is revolution going on in waste management, which Big Brother would be proud of.

Tucked away under the rim of wheelie bins found in two Sydney councils are small radio frequency tracking devices collecting information on a households waste habits.

Randwick Mayor Bruce Notley-Smith told The World Today they are the way of the future.

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