I.D.ology "treats cows as individuals", as they say on their website.

This video gives a decent glimpse of not just what traceability looks like for livestock, but more importantly, how the technology behind it is being marketed. One of the RFID tag readers is, not surprisingly for agribusiness marketing, named using a military analogy: "Crossfire". Enjoy! (.mpg, 32 Mb, 3 min 14 s). Beeeeeeoooooooop.

BeefStocker USA has created a spreadsheet to estimate the cost of the RFID tagging component of compliance with NAIS.

But as NoNAIS points out,

Ag Observatory published two somewhat contradictory stories from the newswires on March 15th that both relate to the discovery of the third case of mad cow disase. The first deals with legistlators who are capitalizing on this discovery to make the National Agricultural Identification System (NAIS) for tracing cattle mandatory. Right now it's voluntary, and as this article states,

About 10 percent of the 2 million premises nationwide have been registered.

They fail to mention, however, that these are mostly the largest feedlots and slaughterhouses.

Meanwhile, the other article outlines the USDA's plans to reduce the amount of testing of cattle at the time of slaughter.

The computer scientist who wrote Minix, which was the inspiration for Linux, has just shown that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are vulnerable to viruses and worms. In a laboratory setting, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, infected RFID tags with a computer worm, capable of transmitting itself to other tags.

As an article at New Scientist states,

A tag infected with a worm and attached, for example, to a piece of luggage could rapidly infect other luggage in an airport, the Dutch researchers say. "On arrival at other airports, these cases will be scanned again and within 24 hours, hundreds of airports throughout the world could be infected.

Someone recently posted about RFID tags on food on the hugely popular "news for nerds" website Slashdot:

Angry_Admin writes "According to the article at IT World Canada, Recent food security scares have triggered public outcries and intense concern. People want to know exactly what is in their food, and what is done to it by whom. In response, Canada and many other countries are introducing traceability requirements - records that track all links in the food supply chain, from farmers to processors to retailers to consumers. The Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada agency recently released a policy framework, stating the goal is to make 80 per cent of all food products traceable by 2008."

Of course, you only read Slashdot for the hundreds of witty comments by hackers, such one guy who predicts this will prompt questions like: "Why is my Big Mac linking back to a horse farm??". Unfortunately, most of the tech geek comments are very optimistic about RFID, partially because many realize that RFID will be creating an increasingly

According to a new report, by 2015 over 900 billion food items will be tagged with RFID technology. One blurb:

Billion dollar businesses will be created as a consequence - much the same as happened with barcodes years ago.

This report, brought to you by the supply chain management illuminati over at "Research and Markets", costs only $1800, and is available here.

Caspian (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasian and Numbering), an American privacy advocacy group, is taking issue with Tesco, the UK's largest Supermarket chain, over their trials of RFID tagging on individual food items, as opposed to just the cases involved in shipping. Wal-mart, who pioneered the retail sector's mass adoption of RFID tags, has also been criticized for this.Here's the article

While i don't think that gleaning information from consumers is the primary purpose for RFID tags, it certainly represents a major threat, and once instituted, represents a major technological wedge that could help ratchet down privacy laws. It would be a truly golden opportunity for many a market research firm. Here's an article by Katherine Albrecht, the founder of Caspian, about the imminent use of RFID in supermarkets, in the context of other supermarket information gleaning technologies. The privacy advocacy groups, such as Caspian, also represent a potential ally against the dark lords of transnational commodity chain governance.