Washington's protections for the EDL's RFID

This month's Scientific American provides perspectives on many of the issues we work on at TLP, and is well worth a read. Katherine Albrecht pens an article on RFID, in which she discusses privacy concerns over the EPC Gen2 style RFID tags in Washington's Enhanced Driver's License (EDL). However, the article gives the misimpression that Washington state took no action to protect the privacy of EDL holders. In fact, the 2008 Washington Legislature passed a bill, supported by the ACLU, that limits the reading of EDLs for purposes other than border crossing. Other states that are considering border crossing driver’s licenses should be aware of Washington's efforts. To learn more, interested people also should look to the concerns and solutions raised in the video archive from the RFID Policy Roundtable, which we organized and co-sponsored with the University of Washington School of Law's Shidler Center for Law, Commerce, and Technology and Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic.