The Day of the RFIDs

by Edward M. Lerner

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  Fictionwise

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©2005 by Edward M. Lerner

  First published in Future Washington, ed. Ernest Lilley

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  The way into the Homeland Security Bureau seldom runs through mom & pop grocery stores and the Internet Movie Data Base. Even less often does that route continue onto the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

  Chalk me up as one to take the road (lane, alley, trail, deer path) less traveled.

  I'm not blogging this for your sympathy—but I hope, at the least, to establish credibility and get your attention. I'm posting this, in fact, for your own good. And, while I am being direct, one more thing....

  I'm not the only one being watched.

  * * * *

  At one level, I would like to blog my story under that grand old pseudonym “Publius.” As patriotic, though, as I believe my goals to be, my role model is someone far removed from Madison or Hamilton or Jay. There is, in any event, nothing to be gained from a pen name: The feds know exactly who I am. The challenge lies not in anonymity, but in elusiveness ... at least long enough to spread the word. Maybe personal details will make this all a bit more credible.

  So who am I? The family name has always been a point of obscure pride to my parents: Boyer. “Like the suave actor, my boy,” Dad would say, as though I had any idea whom he meant. “You could be like him.” Despite my cool attempts at disinterest, I eventually absorbed that said long-gone thespian was Charles Boyer, with whom I identified about as much as with Bela Lugosi or Fred Flintstone.

  Oddly omitted from this bit of cinematic trivia was how the black-and-white era actor pronounced his name: boy-YEA. Grandpa had Americanized the name, so that it came out boy-ER—from which it was a short step to boy-ARE. As in: Boy, are you a geek. The family business being a small grocery, it was only a small step further to the leitmotif of my youth: Geek Boy are dee.

  The grocery wasn't all bad. It supported the family, and I had a built-in after-school job—which didn't help the Boyardee jokes. Dad, fortunately, wanted me out of the store as much as did I. Owning a grocery store means hard work and long hours. “If you follow in my foot steps, Zach,” he would volunteer more or less weekly, “I will personally break your ankles.” Not that there was ever any chance I would make such a career choice: The geek taunts were reasonably well-founded. I'm good with computers and better with microelectronics. I went to college to become an EE and meant never to look back.

  Easier said than done.

  It's not that I ever thought the store did well, but pitching in every day after high school I had believed the place did okay. Going away to college gave me a whole new perspective. Seeing the store only every few months, on holidays and at breaks, the place looked different to me: dated, fewer shoppers each time, an ever-older clientele, brands that—now that my friends regularly shopped at Wal-Mart and Costco and Big Bob's—seemed oh so dated.

  Throughout high school I had argued with Dad about upgrading to checkout stations with barcode scanners. (I'm sure you know the advantages: fast, efficient checkout and machine-readable data on what was selling.) It wasn't like I was pushing new technology. I had lost the argument, of course. Tech was never Dad's thing, so you can imagine how he felt about putting serious money into it.

  By the time I had finished college, I had seen at the big-box stores the technology that was fast replacing barcodes—and there were Mom and Dad still punching prices into old cash registers, still walking the aisles to decide what to reorder when. They were doomed ... without my help, anyway.

  * * * *

  Through These Portals

  Pass the Best-Fed Mortals.

  * * * *

  Growing up, the carefully hand-lettered sign on the store's entrance seemed clever. It might even have been true once. But time marched on and “portal” came to mean Yahoo! and AOL. As the sign faded, the clientele, looking progressively too well-fed, gained paunches and lost hair. And outside of the undertaking business, an ever-aging clientele is bad news.

  That's how, new-and-fascinating EE day job notwithstanding, I came to spend hours each week in big-box emporia. On weekends, their cavernous aisles echoed with a chittering, droning, buzzing sound that would make seventeen-year cicadas proud. But it was for a good cause.

  The barcode technology Mom and Dad had yet to accept was fast being replaced by radio frequency ID tags: RFIDs. That's “are-fids,” if you prefer to speak your acronyms (and like triffids, if you favor the classics). While a barcode can be read only when in line of sight—you've seen the red laser beams at checkouts—the coded microwave pulses to which an RFID tag responds are omni-directional. One invisible, inaudible, electromagnetic ping! and the whole jumbled contents of a cartful of books or CDs—or groceries—declares itself.

  An RFID tag would never be as inexpensive as ink lines printed on a label. Still, a tag was simple electronics. The couple cents an RFID tag costs were insignificant compared to the faster, foolproof checkout it enabled.

  "You're so good at spotting new products before they become hot,” Dad began saying. I understood his surprise: Did you know just one in ten new food products survives even a year? After a few demonstrations (I called both Yebeg Wot, an Ethiopian lamb-in-red-pepper-sauce dish, and organic mushroom burgers before either was featured in Grocers Weekly), he began stocking pre-trendy—and high-margin—ready-to-go meals on just my “intuition."

  I knew better than to try an explanation. The RFID scanner in my pocket, its sensitivity boosted by a few tricks I'd mastered in college, invisibly polled the carts of every shopper exiting whatever big-box retailer I chose to loiter by. Dump the data into a PC, sort, and voilà: market research. But catching fads was only postponing the inevitable, unless—fat chance—Mom and Dad could match big-box volume and buying power.

  At this point I was actually starting to feel a bit like Charles Boyer, whom I had finally gotten around to scoping out on imdb. Boyer had done a ton of movies and TV I'd never heard of, and a few I had. In a world of 500-channel digital cable, “The Rogues” was always on some network. Damned if he wasn't suave, and who doesn't like to see scoundrels get their comeuppance?

  So, in a way, Plan B was Dad's fault.

  RFID applications are not limited to checkout. The newest thing in groceries is smart shelves. Picture a smart store that with a few microwave pulses identifies every jar of pickles and can of cranberry sauce in stock, including those orphaned items abandoned aisles away from where they belong. It's now possible to signal a merchandise management system—even before the shopper meanders to the front of the store—that it is time to reorder something.

  Plan B required a newer gadget, one that took me inside the stores instead of staking them out. Wouldn't it be interesting, I had decided, if merchandise management systems were to believe that phantom jars of sauerkraut were selling like hotcakes? That quarts of eggnog were being abandoned in freezer cases? It didn't take much to make my little gadget pulse random UPC, batch, and package numbers as I roamed the aisles. My inventory gremlins were ephemeral—but, I guessed, troubling enough to reintroduce into the ordering loop safely fallible and inefficient humans. Judging from the recent occurrences of stock boys and girls wandering the aisles with clipboards, my first several ventures had been successful.

&nbs
p; On foray number eight, the feds nabbed me.

  * * * *

  After 9/11, everyone said everything had changed. After the 2/4 dirty-bomb attack on the Super Bowl, everything finally did. The new Homeland Security Bureau was the most visible proof. The newest domestic intelligence agency was not known for its candor: It appeared in media reports as Homeland BS far more often than innocent typos could explain.

  I was driven by two taciturn feds to the headquarters of the country's newest intel agency. Growing up in outer metro DC, I had endured too many school field trips downtown to expect aesthetics from modern government buildings—but this recent construction was just stunningly ugly. My impression, as our nondescript sedan swept past armed guards and a security gate into the underground garage, was of a concrete castle rendered by MC Escher.

  I didn't see how what I had been up to could be illegal ... but oblivious and impervious as I was then to current events, I also knew the government had taken to making rather expansive assertions under the Patriot Act. It did not help that my perceptions of the FBI, a big chunk of which had become a core component of the HSB, had been formed by “The X-Files."

  By the time they laid it out to me in a spartan, windowless room, I was numb with shock. Big Bob's had no intention of sharing their sales data, so a case could be made for theft. The exceptional sensitivity of my Plan A RFID receiver notwithstanding, I had had to stand on Big Bob's property—the parking lot—to get useful signals. That added a possible case for trespass. And, they mused, how confident was I a jury wouldn't find hacking the most credible explanation for the indoor signals my Plan B transmitter had been emitting?

  Trespass? I had bought something on every trip, which made me, in technical terms, a customer. Theft? Rival retailers had sent secret shoppers into competing stores since forever. More than once Dad, having spotted a furtive note taker, had offered another store's spy a cup of coffee and a chair. Polling RFIDs just made the data collection more efficient.

  But possibly I had started down a slippery slope by injecting gremlins into Big Bob's inventory statistics. How many, in a jury of my supposed peers, would be people whose VCRs endlessly flashed 12:00 (any jurors who still owned VCRs would be worrisome enough) and whose children dutifully reset their digital clocks twice a year? Could those peers be convinced my simulated RFID responses were not a hack attack? How much was I willing to bet on that?

  As my peril began to sink in, the special agent in charge hinted obliquely at the real deal. What the bureau truly wanted was my evident smarts on RFID transceivers. Mine had better range than the gear they were buying.

  The best I could hope for in this situation was massive legal bills I would be years in paying off. Worst case would be legal bills plus who knew how much jail time?

  What would you have done?

  It was only much later that I realized the one thing the feds wanted above all else: to avoid a trial.

  * * * *

  Despite a life-long fascination with the space program, there was never any realistic chance I would become a rocket scientist. As kids, sparklers were the only Fourth of July fireworks my brothers and I were ever allowed—and the way Mom winced on those rare occasions Dad brought sparklers home sucked all the fun out of the experience. Then Sojourner rolled its first few yards onto the Martian surface. Problem solved.

  NASA, it turned out, was not the only group that developed robots. By the time I graduated from college, DARPA—that's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—was putting more funds into robots than was NASA. I'd never had any interest in defense contracting, but lots of DARPA-supported research was and is just way cool, cutting-edge stuff. That's how I wound up working for a Beltway Bandit on a DARPA contract. My bosses no doubt thought about one kind of “dual use” for the new technology while I was imagining another ... and while I nursed my dreams, if and when NASA ever again had money, of someday building robots at JPL.

  It did not, amid the never-ending and ever-expanding war on terror, take much to outspend NASA on robots. My piece of the DARPA project was, not surprisingly, on the electronics side, and the budget scarcely covered salaries. To keep costs down, I did my proof-of-concept work using what the govvies call COTS. That's “commercial off the shelf,” an acronym which, despite the plain semantics of its phrase, had been nounified. I needed a radio link between a lander and its rover—or, at customer briefings, between a war fighter's handheld controller and the tiny, semiautonomous scout vehicle it controlled. The cheapest, most accessible COTS used unlicensed radio spectrum. You know: the frequencies used by low-powered gadgets like WiFi wireless LANs and cordless (not cellular) phones.

  It was the damnedest thing. My rover would work just fine for days and then, for no apparent reason, it would glitch. Long story short, there was intermittent interference on the command link. My colleagues razzed me about my ill-advised choice of frequency (I didn't mention the dearth of cordless phones on Mars), and, rather than rebuild, we moved the project into a shielded lab. It didn't help.

  Okay, NOW, long story short. Much time and expensive test equipment later, the problem was traced to several items of new clothing.

  Would you care to guess what inexpensive labeling mechanism also uses low-power RF at unregulated frequencies?

  * * * *

  There's no reason to drag my erstwhile employers into this, not that much detective work would be necessary to identify them. For purposes of this history, “the corporation” will do just fine. Given the dual-use nature of my work, and who was funding it, I had been asked to apply for a Top Secret clearance. I had reluctantly gone along, comforted by the two-plus year backlog in clearance investigations. I was new enough to the real world to still be thinking in college-student time: Nothing matters if it can be postponed past the end of a semester.

  My bosses at the corporation were beyond ecstatic when I mentioned a friend-of-a-friend introduction to an HSB project manager interested in synergies between my current work and Bureau needs. The HSB got a fast-tracked research project, the corporation got a sole-sourced contract, and I got a bonus and an impressive-sounding title. HSB tracked down my long-dormant clearance application.

  After my clearance came through, miraculously processed within a few weeks, I finally began to understand the Bureau's interest in me.

  You can be excused if you believe an RFID can only be read from inches to a few feet away. The reason, when you approach the subway turnstile, you must hold your smart card right next to the sensor is not that the embedded RFID tag can't be sensed from much greater distances. Precisely because cards can easily be read from several feet away, the same pulse that wakes up and momentarily powers your smart card is activating the cards of everyone near you. Your card must be within inches of the sensor to make its reply sufficiently and unambiguously stronger than all others. The transit folks want to know whose account to decrement for the fare.

  After uninvited RFIDs made my robots malf enough times, I concluded it was easier to teach ‘bots to filter out unexpected return pulses than to strip-search everyone entering the lab. Filtering: It sounds deceptively simple. It's not. Think about coping in real time with arbitrary numbers of RFID tags. Each tag might emit any possible product code or serial number. Each signal as detected by the robot varies unpredictably in strength and direction as I or my coworkers pace. The same filtering technology, repurposed in my homemade scanner, is what made my parking-lot forays productive. The trick was to capture, not reject, the streams of RFID reports.

  The HSB wanted my signal-processing logic—and they wanted me to keep enhancing it.

  * * * *

  Bureau folks never refer to their headquarters as headquarters, only (in hushed tones) as the John Ashcroft Building. That's generally abbreviated JAB, and the same wags who dubbed the organization Homeland BS speak as disparagingly of the Junior Achievers Building.

  Hushed tones or irreverence? That choice nicely encapsulates my months of ambivalence. No matter how often I r
eturned, the boxy, mostly windowless JAB never lost its hunkered-down, fortress-like aspect. But once I went through the curbside row of massive concrete obstacles unsuccessfully masquerading as planters, passed three tiers of badge readers and armed guards checking photo IDs, penetrated the maze-like corridors into the heart of the structure, an eerie surrealism always manifested itself.

  Flyers that advertised carpools and retirement parties were taped beside doors secured by cipher locks and ominous warning signs. Armed agents in well-tailored suits were outnumbered by casually dressed electricians, programmers, janitors, and clerks. Stacks of still-boxed computers on pallets lined the halls, but it took weeks—and then, only if you knew whom to sweet-talk—before the Security and Infrastructure folks would hook one up. Parts of the interior were under construction at all times, providing isolated work space for some investigation or other, and altering pedestrian traffic flow from month to month. Yet somehow, despite all the security, random artisans were allowed into JAB to sell ugly handicrafts at tables in the cafeteria. And somehow, even in the very bowels of JAB, gear would regularly go missing from labs.

  My new career had me conflicted from the start. It was hard not to feel good about helping stop the bad guys. I didn't know, nor did I think I needed to, who was caught how. It was sufficient to hear vaguely that terrorist plots were being disrupted. Evidently I also had no need to know exactly how my ever-longer-range receivers were being applied; in my mind's over-imaginative eye, I envisioned agents tracking unsuspecting bad guys at a discreet distance. At some level, I recall feeling Roguish—but more like the crazy-coot uncle than a main character. Than like the dapper Marcel St. Clair played by Charles Boyer. And at yet another level, I have to admit, I was a kid set free in a toy store. Where homeland security is concerned, money was never an issue. It is hardly coincidental that the Beltway Bandit pronunciation of HS Bureau became Hasbro.

  On the other hand ... this simply wasn't a line of work I had ever thought to get into, nor was I getting a single robot an inch closer to Mars or Titan. Nor was I helping Mom and Dad. My new, very humorless, customers had made it abundantly clear that my RFID trolling expeditions were over.