Liz McIntyre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

"Spychips" co-author Liz McIntyre speaks out against RFID on CBS 11 TV Dallas [1]

Liz McIntyre is a consumer privacy expert and co-author, along with Katherine Albrecht, of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID." In this book, the authors reveal how organizations like Procter & Gamble, Gillette, Wal-Mart, and even the U.S. Postal Service plan to use tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track everyday objects—and even people—keeping tabs on everything you own and everywhere you go.

McIntyre regularly researches, writes and speaks about the financial, privacy, and civil liberties impacts that technologies like RFID will have on consumers. She serves as the Communications Director for CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), an organization that advocates free-market, consumer-based solutions to the problem of retail privacy invasion. In this role, she has been the master strategist for many of the organization’s most successful media campaigns.

She and Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of CASPIAN, made the term "spychips" synonymous with RFID, and started the anti-RFID website http://www.spychips.com.

1 Books
2 Media
3 Publications
4 External links

[edit] Books

McIntyre co-authored the book "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID" with Katherine Albrecht. See Amazon listing: [2] The book, winner of the November 2005 Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty, lays out the serious privacy and civil liberties implications of RFID. Bruce Sterling, who wrote the foreword for the book, called it "a masterpiece of technocriticism" and compared it to Rachel Carson's famous work "Silent Spring."

Boston Globe tech reporter Hiawatha Bray wrote, Spychips "makes a very persuasive case that some of America's biggest companies want to embed tracking technology into virtually everything we own, and then study our usage patterns 24 hours a day. It's a truly creepy book and well worth reading."

Marc Rotenberg, Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) gave Spychips a hearty endorsement, writing "Spychips is one of the best privacy books in many years....The privacy movement needs a book. I nominate Spychips."

Not surprisingly, RFID industry representatives have criticized the work, claiming it exaggerates some RFID privacy threats. McIntyre and Albrecht have rebutted such criticisms. See for example: [3] and [4].

McIntyre and Albrecht's second book "The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance" explores how RFID technology could enable the fulfillment of widely-held interpretations of biblical prophecy. The authors use public documents and the words and deeds of the industry to support their arguments.

[edit] Media

McIntyre is a fixture on the talk radio circuit and has been a guest expert on shows like Forbes, Allan Handelman, Thom Hartmann, Greg Allen, CBC Radio, Coast to Coast, Law and Disorder and BBC Radio. Her TV appearances include Democracy Now!, At Home Live, CNBC Squawkbox, and other news programs.

[edit] Publications

Liz McIntyre's publications include:

Position Paper on the Use of RFID in Consumer Products. Co-authored with Katherine Albrecht and Beth Givens. November 14, 2003. Full text at: http://www.spychips.com/jointrfid_position_paper.html

RFID: The Big Brother Bar Code (Co-authored with Katherine Albrecht) ALEC Policy Forum, Winter 2004, Volume 6, Number 3, pp. 49-54. Full text at: http://www.spychips.com/alec-big-brother-barcode-article.html