Calif. RFID Bill Drops Moratorium, Could Pass Senate

According to to the bill’s sponsor, California Senator Joe Simitian, and the group that opposed the earlier version of the bill, these new amendments were the result of many months of intense meetings and negotiations between the bill's supporters, which include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and its opposition, which rallied under an industry group called the High-Tech Trust Coalition. The latter includes representatives from three technology trade groups—American Electronics Association (AEA), the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM Global) and EPCglobal—as well as several vendors of RFID products, including Oracle, Philips Semiconductors, Symbol Technologies and Texas Instruments.

"I made as much progress as I could," says Simitian regarding the months of negotiations. "I think we've got a good, clear process in place that allows for additional debate by referral to CRB, but while that's happening, we have modest protection [through interim rules], so that if and when the technology proliferates, we'll have some protections."

"Getting rid of the ban [moratorium] was head and shoulders above everything else in terms of our decision to remove our opposition to the bill," says Roxanne Gould, spokesperson for the High-Tech Trust Coalition and a senior vice president of government and public affairs for the AEA. "Once we were past that, there were a number of particular issues to work through."

Among these issues was assigning exemptions to the interim rules. According to the latest amendments, any state or local program for implementing RFID-based identity documents that begins prior to Jan. 1, 2007, would be exempt. Also exempt would be any system for which a request for proposal (RFP) has been publicly issued prior to Sept. 30, 2006, and any system for which a contract has been executed prior to Sept. 30, 2006. Other exemptions, which predate the most recent amendments, would be RFID-based documents used in prisons, corrections facilities, hospitals, nursing facilities and emergency scenarios, as well as building-access cards and parking-garage passes. Court-ordered electronic monitoring would also be exempt.

Gould says that if the bill passes into law, she hopes the results of the CRB study will lead to a decision by the state legislature to develop regulations regarding how RFID could be used in identity documents, rather than a permanent assignment of the interim rules. "We don't want protections to be codified," she says. "If something comes along that changes the technology, the protections might not apply any more. We want regulations that are more fluid."

This summer, Senator Simitian also introduced two bills, SB 433 and SB 1078, which were derived from SB 768 but which would have limited their scope to driver's licenses and student identification cards, respectively. The bills called for a three-year moratorium on the use of RFID in the cards (see New RFID Bills Moving Through Calif. Assembly). Now that the more comprehensive SB 768 is moving forward, Simitian is likely to drop these other two bills.

If the Senate approves SB 768, Simitian is confident the governor will approve it. "We've tried to work with the governor's administration on this issue, and we've taken their comments in consideration in fashioning the bill," he says.