The report was prepared by the DHS's Emerging Applications and Technology Subcommittee and was presented to the agency's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee last week in San Francisco.

The advisory committee is charged with recommending to DHS leaders how the agency should use RFID technology.

The document remains a work in progress, said a DHS spokeswoman via e-mail after the meeting last week. The emerging-technology subcommittee will continue to review public comments on the plan that are submitted through its Web site, she said.

"The subcommittee also will be doing in-depth discussions with program areas within DHS that currently successfully deploy RFID technology for a variety of program purposes," the spokeswoman added.

The draft report had stated that while RFID is useful for tasks like inventory management, the technology should rarely be used to track people. The risks to privacy outweigh the technology's communications and security benefits, the authors said. They recommended that "RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings."