Katherine Albrecht, the founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (nocards.org), shared her research on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) products. The small tags which emit identifying signals, are being pitched by major retailers to replace bar codes, and the marketing applications are "quite chilling," she commented.

Albrecht expressed concern that the tags would be read by hidden scanners without consumers' awareness and that marketers would be compiling information about people that they don't necessarily want to share. While the industry is claiming that RFID tags can be turned off after a consumer purchases an item, Albrecht discovered at her trip to the Future Store in Germany, they actually weren't disabling the chips even though they claimed they were.

The government is also involved with the technology, she warned. Cash itself may eventually have RFID chips installed in it, creating a larger tracking and accountability database that Albrecht predicted would be a further erosion of privacy. Of even greater worry, she sees a time when people may be coerced into having implants placed into their bodies in order to make purchases, which she correlated with the "Mark of the Beast" from the Book of Revelation.

Quake Update

First hour guest, geologist Jim Berkland reacted to a UCLA geophysicist's prediction that there would be a major quake in Southern California area by Sept. 5. He noted that the scientist didn't cite probabilities, something he always does in his predictions. In fact, Berkland concurred with this quake estimate, saying that there would be an 80% chance of a major quake in the Pacific area, during the first week of July, August and September. One way of detecting an upcoming quake is noting a rise in missing animal reports, he related, explaining that pets depend on the magnetic field to find their way home, and this field may become disrupted in the days preceding an earthquake.