Scared Mexicans Turn to Bogus Tracking Chip Implants
August 29th, 2011Via: Washington Post:
Of all the strange circumstances surrounding the violent abduction last year of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, the Mexican power broker and former presidential candidate known here as “Boss Diego,” perhaps nothing was weirder than the mysterious tracking chip that the kidnappers allegedly cut from his body.
Lurid Mexican media accounts reported that an armed gang invaded Fernandez’s home, sliced open his arm with a pair of scissors and extracted a satellite-enabled tracking device, leaving the chip and a streak of blood behind.
Fernandez was freed seven months later with little explanation, but the gruesome details of his crude surgery have not dissuaded thousands of worried Mexicans from seeking out similar satellite and radio-frequency tracking products — including scientifically dubious chip implants — as abductions in the country soar.
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In recent years, all manner of Mexican media reports have featured the chips, with some estimating that as many as 10,000 people are walking around with the implants. Even former Attorney General Rafael Macedo told reporters in 2004 that he had a chip embedded “so that I can be located at any moment wherever I am.”
That’s pure science fiction – a sham – say RFID researchers and engineers in the United States. Any device that could communicate with satellites or even the local cellular network would need a battery and sizable antenna, like a cellphone, they say.
“It’s nonsense,” said Mark Corner, an RFID researcher at the University of Massachusetts.
Xega executives declined to respond to questions about the specifications of their products, citing security protocols. When pressed, Kuri acknowledged that a Xega implant would be essentially useless unless the client carried the GPS-enabled transmitter – meaning the chip might bring psychological security but little practical benefit for a rescue operation.
I don’t know if RFID chips can communicate with satellites, but I would like to point out some lies laid out by the researchers:
“Any device that could communicate with satellites or even the local cellular network would need a battery and sizable antenna, like a cellphone, they say”
That’s not how the RFID chips works. It doesn’t “communicate” with satellites, it the satellites that communicate with it. That’s a big difference. Those chips don’t need any power source, you need to think of them as simple mirrors (with a pattern in it to code informations, but whatever). So you throw some radio frequencies at the chips and then they shine back a signal like a mirror would do. Now granted, the signal mirrored back by the chip is very weak, but what they need to listen to it is not a bigger power source in the chip, but simply a bigger satellite dish.