APPLICATIONS OF RFID TECHNOLOGY IN LAW-ENFORCEMENT
In an episode of Law and order aired in 2006, a husband suspects his wife of having an affair. He drugs his wife and implants an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag under her skin and installs readers in the doorways of places she hangs out with her lover. When his suspicions of his wife get confirmed, he kills the lover’s wife and frames the lover. Likewise, in Casino Royale, James Bond gets injected with a rice-sized RFID chip to function as a real-time location device. With me, I love running marathons, and every time I take part in a marathon, I get to wear a bib which has an RFID Race timing tag fastened behind it. Antennas which the organiser’s place on the marathon route capture and inform me mind-blowingly accurate, start, split, and finish times of my run.
Hardly a day goes by these days without RFID being portrayed in movies or television or it being used in our daily life. RFID has now become part of mainstream culture. RFID tags are now being bound to almost everything, including cash, clothing, and possessions, or implanted in animals and people. The possibility of reading personally linked information without consent has raised severe privacy concerns. Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre in their book “SpyChips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move” have marvellously clarified how we are ,sauntering towards a world of no privacy. Where every purchase we make is being documented, and every belonging is being numbered, and how someone continents away could have a record of everything one has ever shopped.
RFID chips are tiny information technology devices that we fasten or embed in things we want to track or identify. An RFID system uses tags affixed to things to be identified. Two-way radio transmitter-receivers called readers ,send a signal to the tag and read its feedback. RFID tags can be either passive, active or battery-assisted passive. An active tag has an on-board battery and occasionally transmits its ID signal. A battery-assisted passive (BAP) has a small battery on board that turns on when in the presence of an RFID reader. A passive tag is inexpensive and smaller because it has no battery.
Some RFIDs are as tiny as a grain of sand and are very inexpensive, and are today replacing barcodes to identify a product or package. Every item on this planet can have its unique RFID identifier and a database of information. Therefore, they are being used on security access cards for business entry, in automated toll readers on highways, and in implants in livestock to track meat production and to stop car theft by preventing a car from starting without a proper code from the RFID chip entrenched in the ignition key.
RFIDs being incredibly useful are being used by the police organisations for managing equipment, inventory, personnel and for controlling access. RFIDs are also helping police departments ensure that they have the most secure environment for safeguarding all police records, police vehicles/equipment and personnel information. They also provide an effective tracking system for police assets, visitors, and staff.
Police use different types of vehicles, weapons, ammunition, communication equipment, computers, gadgets and other technological tools to maintain law and order and detect cases. Maintenance of all these mandates enormous paper work or input of information into the computer which involves labour and time. Affixing RFID tags to the items mentioned above are making it easier for the police to document, to track police equipment from firearms to patrol vehicles, maintain logs and schedules and keep the inventory safe and easily accessible to only those who are authorised to access it.
The Richardson Police Department (RPD), in Texas, is using an RFID-enabled asset-tracking solution to enhance efficiencies, to reduce costs and better secure its uniforms, weapons and other law-enforcement gear. . Not only has the system improved police work, but it has also saved about $9,000 per car yearly in terms of labour payments and boosted efficiency.
RFID is also a great way to regulate access to facilities and ensure that only the personal we allow are accessing the facilities. With RFID, it would be possible to control every door and room, specifying access to only designated individuals. The details of all the personnel accessing any premises gets automatically logged, helping the administrator review and tab the misuse of premises/facility.
We can also put RFID systems to manage the Bell of Arms or the police armouries effectively. Marseille Police Force of France since 2017 has been using high-frequency (HF) and ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) passive RFID technology to track the weapons and equipment that each police officer borrows, where and when this occurs, and when those items get returned. The system is enabling the department to more efficiently locate and loan weapons to its officers, besides creating a history of use of each weapon with a built in alarm system which alerts the armoury if the borrower does not return the gun or if the firearm requires oiling or cleaning. In India, the armouries are still using a register system which is time-consuming, and. error-prone as someone could fudge or misplace the records, besides the weapon could also get lost or stolen.
Evidence handling systems in India have remained unchanged since independence. Manual systems being used now are prone to both inaccuracy and errors and deliberate misuse and abuse. There have been instances of internal theft such as narcotics, guns, jewellery, electronics, and cash–stolen from evidence storage facilities such as Malkhana in police stations. RFID-based systems can offer law enforcement agencies, an electronic, verifiable chain of custody for evidentiary items in criminal cases crucial for conducting criminal investigations and prosecutions. RFID-based tracking can tag evidence got at the point of collection in the field to the evidence storage facility and track all movements of such articles throughout the lifespan of the case and beyond.
In 2018, Mysore Police Department to prevent children from getting lost during annual Mysore Dasara festivities which sees the influx of tens of lakhs of visitors to the city launched for the first time an initiative in collaboration with Vodafone wherein all children under 14 years of age were made to wear RFID tags called Vodafone Happy Cards around their necks at any of the three entry points into the Mysore Maharaja Palace to ensure that their movements and location are tracked till the time they return to the entry/exit point. The U.P, police also used a similar system to trace missing children during the Kumbh.
Mumbai Police were the first to use RFID tags for recruiting police personnel into their force. They used the tags to electronically log the time taken by candidates to complete the mandatory 1.5-km run. Use of tags drastically reduced the time to conduct the running test to less than half.
We could insert RFID tags into outerwear from vests to uniforms, belts and shoes for police personnel, prison inmates, and military personnel. Some countries have now started printing passports embedded with RFID chips; This is helping to track passenger advancement through airports helping airline personnel to reduce late arrivals of passengers at the boarding gate. In the USA, RFID chips are also being embedded into I-94 forms to expedite safe entrance into the country.
Traffic control is a big issue in the metropolitan area. One of the significant challenges in traffic control is to give way to emergency vehicles such as ambulances or police vehicles RFID technology is being used in some countries to control traffic signals. On detection of the emergency vehicles such as Police and Ambulance, the red light on the traffic signal momentarily turns green and turns red again after the emergency vehicle has passed by. This helps the ambulance to reach the hospital in minimum time increasing chances of survival of the patient.The RFID systems are also being used to collect traffic data and control traffic.
A dynamic navigation system based on RFID technology, can help a motorist find the shortest path by avoiding congested roads.The system collects and calculates average speed and average flow information on each way of a district area in a city. It then transmits the information to the server in the district center where a flooding algorithm exchanges and updates information with all neighbor servers and comes up with the shortest and quickest path to a destination.
Karnataka police have executed an E-Beat system that replaces Point books in the beat area with RFID tags with a unique identifier microchip embedded in it. The beat constable carries the reader to the beat point, which reads the unique identity chip inside the RFID tags at the beat points. The beat constable after the completion of his beat duties returns the reader to the Station House Officer who downloads the contents from the reader which has information on the date and time of the visit to a beat point along with name and designation of the person who checked the beats. The system ensures that the beat constable performs his duties appropriately. Besides, it also helps the SHO track manpower utilisation and plan strategies for crime prevention.
If you’ve been on WhatsApp recently, you’ve possibly seen a video going viral on electronic pick-pocketing. The video infers that criminals can use smartphones and other NFC-enabled devices to steal credit card information without one even knowing it. The video depicts criminals using that information to make transactions “without authorisation” and to “clone cards”. A digital thief need not take out a person’s purse out of his pocket instead he clandestinely uses a “RFID” credit card reader to swipe money from a person’s credit card. The person who is being looted would not even know about it. This could happen while one is walking down the sidewalk, pumping fuel at a gas station, or paying for a meal at a restaurant.
We need not panic about digital pick-pocketing because there are safeguards built into contactless cards to prevent significant losses to customers as card readers can not scan these cards for a PIN or CVV (3-digit security code). They have designed contactless cards that can get read only when held close to a reader, and have a limited communication range, meaning that any would-be swindler would have to get close to one to scan his card physically. Another security feature innate to contactless cards being that they permit only low-value purchases and typically have a transaction limit of approximately ₹ 2000/- or less. So it is improbable that you will ever lose much to a scammer. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to invest in a bespoke card wallet, or at least wrap one’s card up in a bit of kitchen foil to prevent such thefts.
Another latest RFID application is its implantation into humans for identification and security purposes. A person with an implanted RFID chip even when unconscious or injured would have his medical data accessible to medical doctors.Gun manufacturers can manufacture hand guns with RFID chips embedded in handguns which will permit only individuals with authorisation to pull its trigger.
Finally, humans are in a way like the RFID tags they have an identity and they vibrate at a particular frequency. The cosmic universe is like the reader which picks up our vibrational frequencies and enables us to manifest people’s places or things in our lives in accordance with the frequency at which we are vibrating. A person with a higher vibrational frequency will attract and manifest a richer, happier and fulfilling life.
Source from: epaper/deccanchronicle/chennai/dt:18.11.2019
Dr.K. Jayanth Murali is an IPS Officer belonging to 1991 batch. He is borne on Tamil Nadu cadre. He lives with his family in Chennai, India. He is currently serving the Government of Tamil Nadu as Additional Director General of Police, Law and Order.
