On March 1, 2006, I gave a talk on embedded RFID at dorkbot-sea's meeting at the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. I shared the bill with Joe McCarthy, who covered "The Practicalities, Peril and Promise of RFID," and Doug Klunder, privacy project director of the ACLU of Washington. My portion walked through the home-built projects, the implantation process, the physical risks, and the privacy and security questions that orbit all of it.
The part the press remembered was the live implantation. Philip Beynon, a guy I'd met up in Canada, wanted an implant and wasn't having any luck convincing anyone up there to do the procedure, so he agreed to come down and be implanted live in front of the DorkBot audience as part of the presentation. We gave the crowd a show, and he left a happy man.
I was about one year into having implants, RFID Toys was just hitting shelves, and I was pouring everything else into a startup called txtGroups. The security argument I made that night is one I'd still defend: in a personal context, even a completely insecure, openly readable tag is a narrow attack vector. An attacker armed with my tag data can do nothing unless they have specifically targeted me and my one-off system; it's useless to the average punk with a skimmer. Still, it's why the secure HITAG went into my right hand.
No video embedded here: the talk lived on miniDV tapes I didn't rediscover until 2009, when I split the half-hour session into four parts to fit YouTube's ten-minute limit of the era. A different decade's archive problem.