Mythbusters Gagged: Credit Card Companies Kill Episode Exposing RFID Security Flaws

This is our 6,000th post on Wilson's Blogmanac. Thanks to Baz le Tuff for tipping me off about this story about RFID, the consumer microchip that knows who you are:

"Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage."
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RFID chips can now be printed on fabric and corrugated cardboard.

In March last year I subbed the following story as News Editor for ProPrint magazine:

RFID market’s boom times ahead
Sales of technologies based on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification, the automatic identification method) are showing strong growth, with new markets emerging that simply did not exist before. The IDTechEx report Active RFID predicts that sales of active RFID systems, including tags and labels, will grow from $550 million in 2006 to $6.78 billion in 2016.

In a field formerly dominated by big corporations – for example, Japan’s Toppan, which recently printed the RFID tags for an innovative and high-tech cosmetics promotion at Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store – the growing market offers attractive niche opportunities to label-printing companies of small-to-medium size. Ink-jet printing of RFID devices is also an application much under discussion globally.

However, big companies have not lost their foothold in the market. America’s Metalcraft, for example, a leader in the industry, is currently buying state-of-the-art RFID converting equipment designed to convert inlays into durable, reusable RFID tags through a high-speed production process. The labels will be subsurface printed using a digital printing process, which will allow custom colours and high-fidelity printing of detailed logos. In the UK, by 2008, well-known department store Marks & Spencer plans to tag 350 million items of apparel annually.

Australian firm ERG, which has more than $US100 million in sales of RFID card systems, has attracted two big orders, including mass transit ticketing solutions, netting the company $US40 million. ERG will install SVC (Stored Value Cards) systems for shops and vending machines in places such as the Philippines.

Categories: rfid, liberty, surveillance, legal