Several years ago, back in the 90’s while researching the area of ID schemes, I ran across a military site about the use of a smart card that was being tested to replace several different military IDs being used at the time. This was to replace meal tickets, dog tags, deployment papers, and many other types of paper work that was used by each person to go about their daily military life.

They used an acronym called MARC, “Machine Readable Card”, which I thought was a great coincidence at the time.

You can still find a version of the web site that details the use and testing of the card. It all comes to this point of easy information collecting and access.

The future of logistics automated management is here today in the form of card technology. Imagine being able to track personnel and supplies with the use of a small plastic card. Imagine being able to access financial, personnel and medical records with this card. Imagine being able to access information that would give in-transit visibility of materiel and supplies. Well, smart cards can offer all that.

You can read the rest of the file here: http://www.quartermaster.army.mil/oqmg/Professional_Bulletin/1997/Winter/smartcard.html

Financial Smart Cards

The military was not the only ones investing time and money into the use of smart cards. Mondex was created in 1990 by two gentlemen in England:

The Mondex Card was invented at National Westminster Bank (NatWest) in 1990 by Tim Jones and Graham Higgins. In December 1993, (NatWest) launched Mondex, then called a “smartcard” as a form of electronic cash based the technology they developed. The next series of Mondex cards were issued in a joint development pilot with Midland Bank (part of HSBC) also in the UK and British Telecom (BT) in Swindon (a town of around 300,000 people, approximately 70 miles west of London.)

With the Mondex Card you could go anywhere in the world and purchase products and the card would automatically exchange to that countries currency. Before MaterCard bought most of the rights to the Mondex Card they sent out a magazine which I still have several copies of:

This was in February 1997, when Mondex became is a subsidiary of MasterCard when MasterCard acquired 51% of Mondex and “decided to adopt Mondex’s technology as its future choice of strategic chip platform and to abandon its work on MasterCard Cash”. The Mondex business model was to grants licenses to franchisees to allow them to exploit the Mondex electronic cash technology in a given territory. From Mondex’s incorporation in 1996 to June 1998, it had issued 30 licenses across 6 continents. and had franchisees in over 50 countries.

In June, 1998 (the date of a MasterCard/Mondex press release) Mondex states that the Mondex card system was “the only electronic cash system in the world to operate with a single global technology allowing for cross-border payments. It allows up to five different currencies to be carried on the card at any one time in separate electronic pockets”. The press release also stated that Mondex in 1998 was being used in 23 implementations (tests or pilots) around the world including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, Philippines, UK and USA. We have yet to find samples from these 23 pilots, but we continue to search.

You really need to see their web site for more info: http://www.mondex.org/mondexuk.html

Back To The MARC

We all worry about the privacy of our information, who has it, what do they know, where do they keep it, and why do they have it. To live in this “Technological” world you can not go anywhere without someone watching. If you noticed there are cameras everywhere watching your every move.

With the great debate over the “National ID” card in this country we need to realize the government already knows everything about you. Your life history is already documented in a “Beast” like data base called “Lexis Nexis” in Ohio, but that’s a story for another time

In my humble opinion all the hype about the National ID is just a way to gather accuracy of the information the government already has. It will be like a national census paid for by the state. The card itself is just a standardization of the way the information can be accessed across the states.

This brings us back to “Standardization”. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world.

The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.

With all those books they had to find a way to catalog them in a computerized manner. This brings us to their version of the MARC. With all this information floating around in cyber space, someone had to find a way to organize it a standard format so all computers could read it.

I know “Your Library Uses The MARC” is a play on words, but in a sense it is still all connected technology. Without making this too long and boring, take a look at their web site.

http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/

This is just a few things I’ve come across in the last 17 years of watching. Post a comment and let me know what you think.

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