 the price per tag will drop to the sub-cent level, which means that they will be widespread. How widespread? Some analysts predict that by 2007 there will be more than five trillion of them deployed. Consider, now, the impact on the network. Each tag can hold as many as 50 bytes of data. If each tag is activated by a reader once a day (although most will be activated more often that), and a significant per- centage of that traffic finds its way into the network well, you do the math. Final Thoughts "In its ultimate form, the entire theater of operations will be networked. Sensors will reside on every piece of equipment and every person populating the field of operations, and information collected by those sensors will be processed in real time using artificial intelligence support to prioritize threats and challenges. In-charge personnel will be able to choose from a Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 portfolio of response options to identify and select targets. "As a result, the time between sensing, processing, deciding and acting will fall dramatically, allowing forces to target the opposition before they can respond." Retail executive, talking about his firm's current RFID product-tracking initiative RFID currently falls into that wonderful Mark Twain-like space that is characterized by the quote, "The only thing worse than people talking about you is nobody talking about you." RFID is certainly getting its share of negative attention, largely due to concerns voiced by privacy advocates. Organizations like the Committee Against Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) have risen up to fight the technology's wide- spread deployment because of concerns about the ability of various agen- cies to track an individual's movements and purchases without authorization. And while it is easy to assign the