Wired News: RFID Foes Find Righteous Ally: "RFID Foes Find Righteous Ally

By Mark Baard

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68133,00.html
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."