Some Tips for Killing RFID Chips

Instructables has a great howto on disabling RFID chips. This is especially fun because they’re everywhere, they contain private data about you and your (bad) habits, and the government is trying to kill you.

RFID chips are very similar to barcodes in the sense that a certain amount of data is contained within them, and then transmitted to a reading device which then processes and utilizes the information. The major difference is that barcodes have to be physically visible to the reading device, which is usually only able to scan them at a distance of a 12 inches or less. RFID tags, on the other hand, do not have to be visible to the reading device. They can be scanned through clothes, wallets, and even cars. The distance from which they can be read is also much greater than that of a barcode. At DEFCON an RFID tag was scanned at a distance of 69 feet, and that was back in 2005, the possible reading distance now is probably much greater than that.

Awesome!