Bug devices track officials at summit

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Officials who attended a world Internet and technology summit in Switzerland last week were unknowingly bugged, said researchers who attended the forum.

Badges assigned to attendees of the World Summit on the Information Society were affixed with radio-frequency identification chips (RFIDs), said Alberto Escudero-Pascual, Stephane Koch and George Danezis in a report issued after the conference ended Friday in Geneva. The badges were handed out to more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and other high-level officials from 174 countries, including the United States.

The trio's report said they were able to obtain the official badges with fraudulent identification only to be stunned when they found RFID chips -- a contentious issue among privacy advocates in the United States and Europe -- embedded in the tags.

Researchers questioned summit officials about the use of the chips and how long information would be stored but were not given answers.

The three-day WSIS forum focused on Internet governance and access, security, intellectual-property rights and privacy. The United States and other countries defeated an attempt to place the Internet under supervision of the United Nations.

RFID chips track a person's movement in "real time." U.S. groups have called for a voluntary moratorium on using the chips in consumer items until the technology and its effects on privacy and civil liberties are addressed.

Mr. Escudero-Pascual is a researcher in computer security and privacy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Miss Koch is the president of Internet Society Geneva, and Mr. Danezis studies privacy-enhancing technologies and computer security at Cambridge University.

"During the course of our investigation, we were able to register for the summit and obtain an official pass by just showing a fake plastic identity card and being photographed via a Web cam with no other document or registration number required to obtain the pass," the researchers said.

The researchers chose names for the fake identification cards from a list printed on the summit's Web site of attendees.