A Slight Oversight
Some guys noticed that there’s RFID tags in US currency. All very scary and such, but there’s one quote that shows a bit of a lack of research:
What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our ‘cash’. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now…
Maybe US currency doesn’t have this, but on every Australian bank note, there’s a unique serial number - has been for many, many years. This is used to track cash. It’s simple and effective, banks will often scan the serial number to ensure the notes aren’t on the stolen list and the numbers are capable of being read automatically. RFID tags just mean you can do it at a distance, but have the down side of not actually being able to tell you who has the note or what they’re doing with it because of the large number of notes that are likely to be around at the time (think supermarket checkouts).
In other words, your cash transactions are still effectively untraceable.
March 2nd, 2004 at 9:28 pm
There’s been discussion of this on other sites as well. It seems that there’s actually a strip of metal to prevent counterfeiting, like our old Austrlian money used to. That strip runs down the middle of the note about where the presidents eye is. Because they were new notes (and thus stuck together pretty well) and microwaved in a block AND it looks that the inside notes were affected more than the outside ones it seems that it was just a case of putting metal in microwave rather than anything sinister and conspirist like RFID.
US notes have serial numbers too, by the way.