BetaNews - Infineon Snags RFID Passport Contract:

The US Government has awarded German-based chipmaker Infineon with a contract to provide a portion of the millions of RFID chips that will make their way into next-generation passports, the company said Monday.

Once again, this is not the mark of the beast (Rev 13:16-18), it's just the next generation of travel documents, but you can clearly see from this report and others like it that there is a lot of money to be made in rolling out the infrastructure for RFID based identity verification programs.

The Australian - RFID to track inmates:

The contract will be awarded this week for the construction of the first prison in Australasia to use radio frequency identification to track prisoners. The ACT government has allocated $128.7 million for the establishment of ACT's first prison, the Alexander Maconochie Centre, named after the 19th century penal reformer. The RFID system will provide real-time tracking of prisoners and prison officers, ACT Corrective Service senior manager Roger Holding says.

Biometrics Goes to School
Associated Content - The Use of Biometric Identification by Universities:

No longer existing solely in the realm of science fiction or spy fantasies, biometrics has emerged as a growing trend in the world. This applies not only to our work and private lives, but to our educational institutions as well. Biometrics has taken hold in many of our colleges and universities, used alone, or more often with, student identification cards. Some have used biometrics for years, and others are beginning to implement their own systems.

I expect this trend in ID verification to continue to show up in new areas, not just schools and travel documents. We are living in an age when it is more important than ever to establish who is who. Are you you?

Yahoo News - U.S. to roll out electronic passports
AP reports, "Despite ongoing privacy concerns and legal disputes involving companies bidding on the project, the U.S. State Department plans to begin issuing smart chip-embedded passports to Americans as planned Monday."

Comment: Again, just a reminder that this is not the mark of the beast (Rev 13:16-18), just some interesting tech trends we are watching. The Book of Revelation specifies several conditions that must exist before the mark of the beast is imposed and none of them exist right now, so you should have no fear about getting a chipped passport. Well, have no spiritual fear, there may be ID theft concerns, but that is beyond my area.

Yahoo News - Expert issues warning about e-passports
AP reports, "Electronic passports being introduced in the U.S. and other countries have a major vulnerability that could allow criminals to clone embedded secret code and enter countries illegally, an expert warned."

This is not to say that they won't go forward with the new RFID passports, it's just a very flawed system.

CNET - HP Unveils RFID's Future Competitor
This report from CNET is about a new type of memory chip that is smaller than a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip and it holds much more information. The new chip is called a Memory Spot and has the potential to bring the age of pervasive computing into full bloom. According to the report:

The Memory Spot has a 10 megabits-per-second data-transfer rate and can store up to 4 megabits of data, although the demonstration chips stored only 256 kilobits. The chip has an integrated antenna, which is why it is so much smaller than an RFID chip, which gets most of its size from the separately attached antennae. It receives power through inductive coupling from a special read-write device that extracts data from the memory on the chip. [...] Taub demonstrated picture albums with the nearly-invisible chip attached to the borders. When a reader touched the chip, audio from the picture was played. Taub next waved the reader over the chip on a medicine bottle and the attached computer received the dosage, direction, and all other pertinent information from the prescription.

It's important to note here that this technology is new, there are no applicaitons yet for it and no infrastructure, but it has the potential to bring a rich digital dimension to almost any object or person.

Yahoo News - Insurers to test implantable microchip
AP reports, "In a new test program, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey plans to implant patients suffering from chronic diseases with a microchip that will give emergency room staff access to their medical information and help avoid costly or serious medical errors, the insurer said on Friday."

ZDNet reports (Biometric ID card plan under British review) that the British plan for national biometric ID cards is going forward.

SFGate - The Last Days of Privacy
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Within the next four months, a major Bay Area supermarket chain plans to introduce a payment system that uses biometric fingerprint authentication to verify customers' identities. Under this system, shoppers in checkout lines won't need to use cash, checks, debit cards or credit cards. Instead, they can place their fingers on scanners that read fingerprints, and once the device links to their bank or credit card accounts, they can buy groceries, get cash back and do everything else shoppers do.

This report is about a biometric payment technology called Pay By Touch and it also discusses ID theft and the trade-off between privacy and convenience. While this system is not the Biblical "mark of the beast" (Rev 13:16-18) it is a reflection of the wider trend in making payments and identity verification more secure.

Financial Times - US monitors global financial transfers
The Financial Times (UK) reports, "Tens of thousands of electronic searches have been conducted under a secret US programme to monitor global financial transfers for signs of terrorist activity, the official in charge of the programme has told the Financial Times."

Comment: This is a trend that is certain to continue. There must be a capability to monitor financial transactions and impose transparency on governments as well as individuals.