RFID to Fight Terrorism

Filed in archive RFID Basics on October 21, 2004

"An associate of Osama bin Laden crawls into a container -- along with some new luxury cars -- in a shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. The goal -- shipping himself to the United States and evading the Department of Homeland Security, with its high-tech officers on the ground at major airports, armed with databases of suspects' photos.

He is foiled, however, when a silent alarm is triggered, and an alert is sent to security over the airwaves, as he lifts the lid of the container in the warehouse. A wireless radio frequency identification or RFID security tag on the container sent the signal, silently, without alerting the intruder."So starts an interesting article outlining a multitude of ways that RFID can be used to fight terrorism.

The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress, are evaluating, piloting or using RFID in numerous applications.

A reader emailed me this past week asking where he could get a grant for RFID. Small businesses in the United States with promising RFID applications that could have anti-terrorism uses will probably find their best bet to be Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. SBIR grants are good for furthering R&D efforts and raising seed money.

Good places to start would be the Department of Defense SBIR website and the Homeland Security SBIR website. Next year's SBIR solicitation for projects at Homeland Security will be pre-announced in just a few weeks.