Briefs

The Register, By Mark Baard, 12 July 2005

A former CIA intelligence analyst and researchers from SAP plan to study how RFID tags might be used to profile and track individuals and consumer goods.

"I believe that tags will be readily used for surveillance, given the interests of various parties able to deploy readers," said Ross Stapleton-Gray, former CIA analyst and manager of the study, called the Sorting Door Project.

Sorting Door will be a test-bed for studying the massive databases that will be created by RFID tags and readers, once they become ubiquitous. The project will help legislators, regulators and businesses make policies that balance the interests of industry, national security and civil liberties, said Stapleton-Gray.

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Sorting Door gets its name from the Sorting Hat in the "Harry Potter" books, which magically determines which school house its wearer will join.

The data mining software in Sorting Door would be provided by SAP, an enterprise software company, which has worked on RFID tests with Wal-Mart, Procter and Gamble and the Metro Group.

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