|
Who Are The Knight Writers |
|
What are you talking about? On the morning of 2003-10-23 the following flyer appeared on the ground in the Purdue engineering mall and several other places around campus. 
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect. I simply cannot resist a mystery. Who are "The Knight Writers"? What makes them so suspicious of Purdue? Is this a hoax? After finding the flyers my first suspicion was that it was probably a hoax. Why? First and foremost the extreme language on the poster bespeaks unnecessary alarmism. It is so bad that it seems to be a parody. There is never a use for three exclamation points in a row. The level of specificity seems curious as well. How do they know that we can be tracked "within sight of the bell tower"? The suggestion, near the end of the flyer, that people should cut up their IDs seems quite likely to be a prank. Of course a replacement ID costs 20 USD so it seems a rather nasty prank to play on poor college students. Second, the name "The Knight Writers" is suspicious. It makes me think that perhaps this is some type of literary or theatrical group looking to create a little performance art. Additionally there is no record of such a group at Purdue. See for yourself. Of course just because something doesn't exist on google doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all. It just makes it very likely. It should also be noted that it takes google almost a month to notice new pages so if it is a very new group their page may not yet be indexed. What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out. I consider myself a skeptic. However unlike some of my brethren I believe that strange claims are worthy of investigation. So I began to investigate. First I scanned a copy of one of the flyers then I posted it to purdue.talk which is of course the news group that is so bad it has gone past bad and back to good again. Here is a log of the conversation. Although there was a lot of joking about paranoids and aliens and government mind control rays several people suggested theories that were worth looking into. Most importantly the technology in question does actually exist. You should read up on RFID tags. They are tiny transponders smaller than a grain of rice which can be purchased for pennys. They are often placed in consumer products and used to track inventory and detect theft. There is no practical reason why they could not be embedded in the new IDs. However, RFID tags must be within about 6 feet of a reader to be used. The campus would have to be literally littered with RFID readers to accurately track students. Perhaps readers could be placed at the entrance to every building to allow "them" to discern which building a student was in at any given time. There is another completely separate but related technology being developed here at Purdue by some researchers over in ECE. It will allow students using the 802.11 wireless Ethernet to automatically print to the printer which is nearest to them. This means that the wireless network will determine your "location" by looking to see which wireless base station you are using and then finding the nearest printer to that base station. You must have a wireless network card for this to work. This could not easily be embedded into an ID card and would be VERY expensive. Not to mention that wireless Ethernet cards, unlike RFID tags, require batteries. The research paper on this project is here, but I won't begin worrying about this until the university starts mandating that I plug my ID into the wall socket every night. I believe the e-Stadium project plans to make use of similar technology to allow you to find the nearest bathroom, exit, or hotdog vendor at home football games. Here are some pretty pictures. In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. So with all of this in mind I went to the strange little callout on 2003-11-03. My rather inebriated room mate took some very blurry photos:
I wore a lovely pyramid shaped tinfoil hat. That is me in Image03. My original intent was to indicate that I was skeptical and to be able to laugh along with the joke if it turned out that this meeting was a big prank. However in retrospect I regret it. I arrived a couple of minutes early and sat down near the back. There were more than a dozen people present and shortly a discussion began about how many people thought that this was a hoax and about how many people thought it was possible. I noticed at least two people had shears, perhaps to cut IDs. Shortly thereafter another gentleman arrived with a tinfoil hat and began passing out tinfoil to all present. He announced that he had brought his umbrella just in case the sky started falling. At this point a quarter of the people left. Moments later after a discussion about how Purdue was an acronym representing some diabolical government agency another quarter of the people left. At this point it seemed that all those remaining were skeptics. So the crowd quickly disbursed. The entire meeting lasted less than 20 minutes. I regret wearing the tinfoil hat not because I looked silly, I always look silly, but because I think I added to the ridicule that drove the half of the room that actually believed away. I was interested in what they had to say. Do they actually know something that the rest of us don't? It is possible and I would like to know. The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing. What is going on? I have no idea. Could Purdue place RFID tags in the new university IDs? Yeah, it would be easy. What would be the benefit? I can't think of one. I suppose that in the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I am a graduate student so I am employed by the university. I could be part of the conspiracy, but I am really just curious. If any member of "The Knight Writers" wishes to contact me and explain their point of view I would be most interested. My PGP key can be found here for confidential communication.
Links: |
