URSA

This essay, “RFID: Airport Greeters and Amber Alerts”, touches on the developments that will make RFID an interesting source for data from which to extract situational awareness, in particular, that “readers” and “tags” (both defined rather broadly… a cell phone equipped to read or communicate with other devices, such as a Bluetooth headset, by RF might fall into both categories) are proliferating rapidly, and while they may be deployed for a specific application, the promiscuous nature of RF means that many more observations will be generated, and might be collected, aggregated and analyzed, by machines that haven’t gotten anything better to do.

Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc. is examining the use of RFID for situational awareness, i.e., how awareness might be gained by the collection and analysis of RF-based data, in particular through third-party collection of data from RFID tags and mobile devices such as cell phones, Bluetooth devices, etc… RFID considered rather broadly. This blog will be used to raise and discuss issues arising from an increasing pervasiveness of RFID, aggregation and analysis of RFID-derived data, and strategies and tactics for revealing and masking features and activities of interest.