Spychips
~

1. Buy a copy of the book as soon as possible for yourself. Major bookstores and local independent booksellers around the country should have copies of "Spychips" in stock. If you can't find it locally, you can order it online from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. If everyone on our mailing list buys just one book in the next day or so, that alone could put it on the brink of NYT Bestseller status.

Here's the link to buy our book on Amazon.com:

http://tinyurl.com/8m22c

2. For dedicated members who are blessed with resources, we ask that you buy at least one additional copy (or as many as you can afford) to share with someone who needs to know this information. "Spychips" would make a great Christmas or birthday present for just about anyone. It's a fascinating read, and we've added our usual style to make it fun and engaging. (There's even a talking plant and a section featuring Elvis!)

3. Please tell your family, friends, neighbors, church members, and co-workers about the book. Encourage them to buy one or more copies this week. One supportive member has even bought several extra copies to re-sell to the customers of his hardware store at cost. It's a great conversation starter to have a stack of books on the counter!

4. If you want your lawmakers to know you are concerned about how RFID will impact our country, consider buying copies for them, too. Please send a note along with your book to let them know how much their constituents care.

At CASPIAN, we have never asked our members (or anyone else) for monetary contributions since our founding in 1999. Many of you have asked how you might support us as we battle consumer surveillance around the world, and we now have the answer: Please help us get the word out to as many people as possible. Buy as many copies of Spychips as you can afford, and distribute them far and wide.

Following my signature, I'm pasting in an excerpt from the foreword to the book written by bestselling author Bruce Sterling to whet your appetite.

Roll up your sleeves, it's time to tell the world what we know!

Thank you and God Bless [CB: aha, ahem, ahoy! is He/She within hailing distance?],

Katherine Albrecht
Founder and Director of CASPIAN

P.S. In addition to great reviews, "Spychips" has already won the prestigious Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty. And not only does "Spychips" contain crucial information everyone should know about the surveillance agenda headed our way, it's also "extremely readable," according to the critics. Here's just one taste of what people are saying:

"Brilliantly written — so scary and depressing I want to put it ddown, so full of fascinating vignettes and facts that I can't put it down."

Forward to "Spychips"
The Futurist Muckrakers by Bruce Sterling

[Excerpt]

Everybody has a role in the RFID industry, because, as this remarkable book makes clear, we're not offered any choice about it. If you've never heard of RFIDs or "spychips," it would be quite a good idea to read this book pretty soon. It's very topical.

If you have any direct role within the RFID industry, then you need to read this book instantly. Hurry. Waste not another precious moment. You won't like this book. Spychips will hurt your feelings. You will blush, and itch, and sweat, and drum your heels, and perhaps tear entire chapters out with squalls of rage, to see a work about your industry which is so jaundiced, and uncharitable, and unflinchingly suspicious, and which makes so much effective, highly damaging, public fun at your expense. So read it, and make all your co-workers read it. You will learn a host of painful, valuable things in a hurry. For you, it may not yet be too late....

This book is the most exciting book about RFID ever written. This is the one RFID book that every RFID enthusiast must own. Not because the book is enthusiastic about the new technology -- but because it's full of passionate, stinging contempt. It's like watching Big Brother come home and get a rolling pin broken over his head by Mrs. Big Brother, who knows that, even though he thinks he's everybody's daddy, he's a stalker, and a voyeur, and a crook, and a cheat, and drunk on his own ego, and a handwashing, sniveling deadbeat who ought to be ashamed of himself.

[I]n its own dainty, feminine, rapier-tongued way, this is a masterpiece of technocriticism. The nascent RFID industry is not Big Brother. Not yet, anyhow. Instead, it is a giant toddler whose supermarket diapers are already richly soiled. It's sure got a mighty ton of dirty laundry for a baby still that small, and in Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, the RFID industry has found a hardworking pair who'll willingly scrub that laundry, name and number every stain, and then pin it out to dry.

These two unique individuals, the Lone Ranger and Tonto of the RFID frontier, are the nightmare scenario for the computerized retail superstore of tomorrow: because they're the computerized super female consumer advocates of tomorrow. And boy have they ever got their industry's number. They've got all two-to-the-96th-power digits of it.

To understand what species of book this is, let me offer a historical analogy. Imagine yourself cruising along in the 1950s chemical industry, happily patenting and spreading potent toxins. Then this searching, thoughtful female journalist, Rachel Carson, who doesn't even have a chemistry degree, comes out of nowhere. A classic popular muckraker, Ms. Carson points out to a shocked public that you're killing not just the mosquitoes but all the pretty butterflies and birds. She writes Silent Spring, and it's so influential and damning, that even your own kids decide you must be nuts. That's also what's happening here....

[W]e're seeing a violent collision of two models here: two loud, flamboyant, irrepressible Internet activists, researching and publicizing the secretive, business-confidential Internet of Things. Anybody who can create that leak between the worlds is gonna get justly famous, and Katherine Albrecht (judging by Google and the hundreds of journalists she has briefed), is already, by far, the most famous RFID expert in the whole wide world. She thinks RFID is an evil crock, but she's sure got a lot to say about it -- all of it is fascinating, some is gross and revolting, and practically all of it hilarious.

This is the first, and maybe the loudest, popular book on a crucial technology of our times. It's not the full or final story -- it's a futurist book, in anticipation of the story -- but history will treat this book kindly.

[snip]

CASPIAN: Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering Opposing supermarket "loyalty" cards and other retail surveillance schemes since 1999

http://www.spychips.com/
http://www.nocards.org/

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