Hacker Con Submits to Spychips

At a Berlin Chaos Communication Congress (CCC)...

Hackers are paying 10 euros each for the privilege of hanging special homebrew RFID tags around their necks or slapping them on their laptop bags. Every few seconds, each of these "CCC Sputnik" badges reports its owner's position to an array of 35 monitoring stations, and spits out the guinea-pigs' every move over a public XML feed.

Why is the CCC, a venue more commonly associated with RFID cracks and spychip destruction devices, supporting such an invasion of its members' privacy? One of the project's leaders, Milosch Meriac, explains the motivation to create the system was to make obvious what is normally hidden in how our technology tracks us.

"The idea was that most of this surveillance technology slowly faded into our lives, and we accepted them," Meriac says. "(We want to) make it possible to bring it into people's heads."