The report, now in draft form, was prepared by the DHS's Emerging Applications and Technology subcommittee. A final version is to be presented Wednesday at a meeting of the DHS's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, which advises the secretary of DHS and his chief privacy officer.

While the authors of the report acknowledge RFID is useful for such tasks as inventory management, the report said that the technology, overall, is undesirable for processes connected with people. The benefits of its support for rapid communication over distances and its uses in security are outweighed by its risks to privacy, the report stated.

"Most difficult and troubling is the situation in which RFID is ostensibly used for tracking objects (medicine containers, for example), but can be in fact used for monitoring human behavior. These types of uses are still being explored and remain difficult to predict. For these reasons, we recommend that RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings," the report said.

Howard Beales, the committee chairman, noted that the report has garnered more public response than usual. The report remains a work in progress, he said, and after being discussed next week, it will probably be returned to the subcommittee for more revisions.

Any formal recommendation to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will probably wait until September or December, when the committee holds its quarterly meeting. "I think RFID in general is a very interesting technology," Beales said, but added that "it can raise privacy concerns." He said these are the sorts of issues the committee and subcommittee will consider.