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Fishy Chips

Thursday night in San Francisco, the library board approved a plan to put microchips in library books. The chips, known as radio-frequency identification devices (RFID), prove helpful in the tracking and warehousing of materials. SF library officials hope to reduce "repetitive stress injuries" from all the sorting and logging and other drudgery of the workplace.

Plus RFID could help resolve a fundamental problem for libraries: once a book or other material is checked out, it might never come back, lost forever in the black hole of society or, as is often the case, someone's private book collection. Sure, there are library fines and the occasional phone call; but those are easy to ignore, provided you don't care that you'll never check out a book again...in that library system. With an RFID, a book can be easily located to its exact location; librarians can suit up like the ATF, bust down your door and swing through your windows, grab the book from its ignoble spot as a coaster protecting your speaker from water rings and return it to its rightful place, where the public can access it.

Okay, I kid. Because I love. But the slightly sinister scenario above is more accurate if one replaces jack-booted librarians (who, after all, are really only concerned for your accessibility to information) with the usual black helicopter thugs we've come to know and love. Say, John Ashcroft, maybe. Here's what freaks out the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the San Francisco case:

...RFID technology raises great privacy concerns because insecure RFID tags will permit inventorying of people's possessions and tracking of people via their possessions. These risks are especially great where books and other reading materials are concerned, because both privacy and freedom of expression are at stake.  Furthermore, we are doubtful that RFID technology will be more cost-effective than existing technologies and practices for check-out, inventory control, and loss prevention.

Libraries have long been very protective of library patron privacy given that surveillance of reading and borrowing records chills the exercise of First Amendment rights. In the famous Tattered Cover case, an American Library Association official testified about "the chilling effect that results from disclosure of library circulation records." The Strategic Plan itself notes that the Library "advocate[s] for and support[s] policies and procedures that protect privacy of all library user records." Concern for privacy of reading records has only increased with the enactment of Section 215 of the USA-PATRIOT Act, which allows the government to subpoena reading records while preventing libraries from saying anything about this invasion of patron privacy.

EFF notes that the only condition by which they would support the SF plan would be the implementation of a "mandatory deactivation" ("mandatory kill") of the RFID tags once the patron walks out the door. Yet even then, they seem squeemish. For good reason: once the chips are in, so to speak, it would be hard to take them out, and even harder to resist using them—if you're an Ashcroftian jack-booted thug, mind you, not a principled librarian—to keep track of that funny looking kid with the Taliban beard and the Noam Chomksy book. Again, the EFF:

Because people carry or possess objects, RFIDs also allow people to be tracked via their things. As far as EFF has been able to determine, today's RFIDs are optimized for low-cost, high-rollout production; they are unobtrusive, "dumb," and lack any form of encryption that would prevent unauthorized persons from reading them.  Thus, although future RFIDs may permit user control, it is our understanding that RFIDs will lack any information security or privacy safeguards for the foreseeable future.

Accordingly, RFIDs present at least two privacy risks.  First, insecure RFIDs permit "inventorying":  anyone with a compatible RFID reader can surreptitiously learn what RFID-tagged things you have or wear.  Second, insecure RFIDs permit different kinds of "tracking."  If an RFID contains information that identifies the person, the person can be tracked via the RFID. 

Even if the RFID does not contain personally identifiable information, a person can be tracked through links to other records.  If the government had access to a library's borrowing records, it could link a person to the books he or she has borrowed even if the RFID itself does not identify the person.

Yikes. Right now, the SF library is a long way from making a final decision, so there is still time to send them e-mail* expressing your concerns—even if you don't live in San Francisco. Precedents get set like this.

(Main links found via librarian.net.)

* Link mails to publicaffairs@sfpl.org.

Posted by kevinmoore at May 8, 2004 12:57 AM | TrackBack