Read an Excerpt
Through These Portals Pass the Best-Fed MortalsGrowing up, the carefully hand-lettered sign on the store's entrance seemed clever. It might even have been true once. But time marched on and "portal" came to mean Yahoo! and AOL. As the sign faded, the clientele, looking progressively too well-fed, gained paunches and lost hair. And outside of the undertaking business, an ever-aging clientele is bad news.
That's how, new-and-fascinating EE day job notwithstanding, I came to spend hours each week in big-box emporia. On weekends, their cavernous aisles echoed with a chittering, droning, buzzing sound that would make seventeen-year cicadas proud. But it was for a good cause.
The barcode technology Mom and Dad had yet to accept was fast being replaced by radio frequency ID tags: RFIDs. That's "are-fids," if you prefer to speak your acronyms (and like triffids, if you favor the classics). While a barcode can be read only when in line of sight--you've seen the red laser beams at checkouts--the coded microwave pulses to which an RFID tag responds are omni-directional. One invisible, inaudible, electromagnetic ping! and the whole jumbled contents of a cartful of books or CDs--or groceries--declares itself.
An RFID tag would never be as inexpensive as ink lines printed on a label. Still, a tag was simple electronics. The couple cents an RFID tag costs were insignificant compared to the faster, foolproof checkout it enabled.
"You're so good at spotting new products before they become hot," Dad began saying. I understood his surprise: Did you know just one in ten new food products survives even a year? Aftera few demonstrations (I called both Yebeg Wot, an Ethiopian lamb-in-red-pepper-sauce dish, and organic mushroom burgers before either was featured in Grocers Weekly), he began stocking pre-trendy--and high-margin--ready-to-go meals on just my "intuition."
I knew better than to try an explanation. The RFID scanner in my pocket, its sensitivity boosted by a few tricks I'd mastered in college, invisibly polled the carts of every shopper exiting whatever big-box retailer I chose to loiter by. Dump the data into a PC, sort, and voil�: market research. But catching fads was only postponing the inevitable, unless--fat chance--Mom and Dad could match big-box volume and buying power.
At this point I was actually starting to feel a bit like Charles Boyer, whom I had finally gotten around to scoping out on imdb. Boyer had done a ton of movies and TV I'd never heard of, and a few I had. In a world of 500-channel digital cable, "The Rogues" was always on some network. Damned if he wasn't suave, and who doesn't like to see scoundrels get their comeuppance?
So, in a way, Plan B was Dad's fault.
RFID applications are not limited to checkout. The newest thing in groceries is smart shelves. Picture a smart store that with a few microwave pulses identifies every jar of pickles and can of cranberry sauce in stock, including those orphaned items abandoned aisles away from where they belong. It's now possible to signal a merchandise management system--even before the shopper meanders to the front of the store--that it is time to reorder something.
Plan B required a newer gadget, one that took me inside the stores instead of staking them out. Wouldn't it be interesting, I had decided, if merchandise management systems were to believe that phantom jars of sauerkraut were selling like hotcakes? That quarts of eggnog were being abandoned in freezer cases? It didn't take much to make my little gadget pulse random UPC, batch, and package numbers as I roamed the aisles. My inventory gremlins were ephemeral--but, I guessed, troubling enough to reintroduce into the ordering loop safely fallible and inefficient humans. Judging from the recent occurrences of stock boys and girls wandering the aisles with clipboards, my first several ventures had been successful.
On foray number eight, the feds nabbed me.
* * * *After 9/11, everyone said everything had changed. After the 2/4 dirty-bomb attack on the Super Bowl, everything finally did. The new Homeland Security Bureau was the most visible proof. The newest domestic intelligence agency was not known for its candor: It appeared in media reports as Homeland BS far more often than innocent typos could explain.
I was driven by two taciturn feds to the headquarters of the country's newest intel agency. Growing up in outer metro DC, I had endured too many school field trips downtown to expect aesthetics from modern government buildings--but this recent construction was just stunningly ugly. My impression, as our nondescript sedan swept past armed guards and a security gate into the underground garage, was of a concrete castle rendered by MC Escher.
I didn't see how what I had been up to could be illegal ... but oblivious and impervious as I was then to current events, I also knew the government had taken to making rather expansive assertions under the Patriot Act. It did not help that my perceptions of the FBI, a big chunk of which had become a core component of the HSB, had been formed by "The X-Files."
By the time they laid it out to me in a spartan, windowless room, I was numb with shock. Big Bob's had no intention of sharing their sales data, so a case could be made for theft. The exceptional sensitivity of my Plan A RFID receiver notwithstanding, I had had to stand on Big Bob's property--the parking lot--to get useful signals. That added a possible case for trespass. And, they mused, how confident was I a jury wouldn't find hacking the most credible explanation for the indoor signals my Plan B transmitter had been emitting?
Trespass? I had bought something on every trip, which made me, in technical terms, a customer. Theft? Rival retailers had sent secret shoppers into competing stores since forever. More than once Dad, having spotted a furtive note taker, had offered another store's spy a cup of coffee and a chair. Polling RFIDs just made the data collection more efficient.
But possibly I had started down a slippery slope by injecting gremlins into Big Bob's inventory statistics. How many, in a jury of my supposed peers, would be people whose VCRs endlessly flashed 12:00 (any jurors who still owned VCRs would be worrisome enough) and whose children dutifully reset their digital clocks twice a year? Could those peers be convinced my simulated RFID responses were not a hack attack? How much was I willing to bet on that?
As my peril began to sink in, the special agent in charge hinted obliquely at the real deal. What the bureau truly wanted was my evident smarts on RFID transceivers. Mine had better range than the gear they were buying.
The best I could hope for in this situation was massive legal bills I would be years in paying off. Worst case would be legal bills plus who knew how much jail time?
What would you have done?
It was only much later that I realized the one thing the feds wanted above all else: to avoid a trial.
