[LINK] Urban myth in the making: Was: Ex IBM Employer reveals TV abandonded analogue band for RFID

[Robin Whittle]

Here is a case-study in bullshit amplification via the Internet.

The common term is "urban myth", but "Internet myth" would be more
appropriate - and these things are not confined to urban areas.


For the purposes of this discussion, I am treating the statement:

    (The) switch from analog to digital television is mainly being
    done to free up analog frequencies and make room for scanners
    used to read implantable RFID microchips and track people and
    products throughout the world.

as bullshit.


A similar mailing list message turned up, completely off-topic, from
a respected contributor on another mailing list (Analogue Heaven -
about music synthesisers) yesterday.  That message quoted a secondary
source and I tried chasing the original source.  The best I could
find was:

  http://www.michaeljournal.org/newtechno.htm

This is a Canadian religious magazine which apparently goes back to
1953:  Some background:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrims_of_Saint_Michael


Now Google finds 94 sites quoting this story:

  RFID "Patrick Redmond" "ex-IBM"

and 115 for:

  TV IBM RFID "Patrick Redmond"

Repeating these searches in the months to come will show something
about amplification factors, saturation curves etc.

My sampling of these pages is that if they refer to anything, they
refer to this one michaeljournal.org page or to some other recent
page, which may refer to that one.

Now I see the same thing appearing on Link, without any apparent
effort to find the original source.

When I first heard of this story on the AH list, I tried to find the
original source, found the michaeljournal.org page, and decided it
wasn't credible enough to mention to anyone.

This dissemination process seems to have started less than a week
ago, largely or entirely though the michaeljournal.org page.  This page:

  http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message837050/pg1

(2009-07-11) lists the michaeljournal.org page, with a date of 25
June 2009.  At the start of that quotation is the following text,
after some cleaning up:

    Ex-IBM Employee Alleges TV Abandoned Analog Band to Make Room
    for Chips

    The Big Picture with Mark Anderson, American Free Press
    corresponding editor, www.AmericanFreePress.net,
    truthhound2 at yahoo.com  & host of RBN’s When Worlds Collide,
    Saturdays, 7 to 9 p.m. central, www.republicbroadcasting.org

Scrutinising the michaeljournal.org page I tried to find where the
images came from.  The last one, of RFID scanners in a library, is a
smaller version of a larger, but otherwise identical image of the
same name at:

  http://www.librarysecurity.co.uk/16280.html

My guess is that the michaeljournal.org page was created at that
site, from text received from somewhere else.

So let's chase an earlier source . . . OK, here is the presenter of
the show:

  http://www.republicbroadcasting.org/m_anderson.html

After some indirect Googling, I found the transcript of the show:

  http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=2757

      Is Micro-chipping the World Behind Switch to DTV?

      Ex-IBM Employee Alleges TV Abandoned Analog Band to Make Room
      for Chips

      The Big Picture/with Mark Anderson, American Free Press
      corresponding editor, www.AmericanFreePress.net,
      truthhound2 at yahoo.com

      & host of RBN’s When Worlds Collide, Saturdays, 7 to 9 p.m.
      central, www.republicbroadcasting.org

      According to a former 31-year IBM employee, the
      highly-publicized, mandatory switch from analog to digital
      television is mainly being done to free up analog frequencies
      and make room for scanners used to read implantable RFID
      microchips and track people and products throughout the world.

      ...

This is dated 25th June 2009, but . . . it cites the
michealjournal.org page as the original source.

So AFAIK, the michaeljournal.org article is the original source of
the recent flurry of activity, and it was created before 2009-07-25.

RFID has been a concern of the Journal since at least 2007, the last
year for which PDF issues of the magazine appear at their site.
Perhaps they went from print, to PDF and now just to posting HTML
articles.

In the "World government, terrorism, microchip" section of the list
of articles:

   http://www.michaeljournal.org/articles.htm

this one, (name misspelt):

  An introduction to New Technologies (Part I). Patrick Edmond
  http://www.michaeljournal.org/newtechno.htm

appears directly after:

  Pawns in the Game A Satanic conspiracy to control the world.
  William Guy Carr

which has "Back to the year 2007" at the bottom of the page.

The Patrick Redmond article is listed before:

  Can Barack Obama save America? Alain Pilote

which is clearly from 2009.

So I can't date the original article.  My guess is that it sat there,
without causing much fuss, until someone quoted it on a blog -
probably due to it appearing on the radio program site - and then
mention of it was amplified in the blogosphere and via mailing lists.

The article contains no justification for this statement:

  The reason they’re doing this is that the UBF and VHF analog
  frequency are being used for the chips, so they don’t want to
  overload the chips with television signals, because the chips
  signals will now be receiving those frequencies.

If you want to know the Truth about RFID:

  http://www.firstpr.com.au/show-and-tell/homeland-security/

or maybe:

  http://www.spychips.com

I think there are potentially serious privacy and security problems
with RFID devices, but I think this analogue TV switchover idea is a
distracting conspiracy theory.  I suspect it will soon become an
urban myth, Internet myth or whatever.

Searching http://www.snopes.com for RFID currently finds 6 mentions,
but none yet of this Patrick Redmond analog TV theory.

 - Robin