Katherine Albrecht, EdD is the founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), a national consumer organization created in 1999 to educate consumer-citizens about shopper surveillance. She is a consumer privacy advocate and anti-RFID spokesperson. Albrecht came up with the term "spy chips" to describe RFID microchip tags, which for example are embedded in some US Driver's Licenses. She holds a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard University. Katherine Albrecht is a resident of Nashua, New Hampshire.
Albrecht was interviewed about RFID chips in Aaron Russo's 2006 documentary From Freedom to Fascism.
Albrecht and Liz McIntyre (CASPIAN's communications director) co-authored the book Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID, which won the November 2005 Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty. The book lays out the potential implications of RFID on privacy and civil liberties. RFID industry representatives have criticized it, claiming the authors exaggerate some RFID privacy threats. In a lengthy rebuttal, Albrecht asked why critics don't "mention sworn patent documents from IBM describing ways to secretly follow innocent people in libraries, theaters, and public restrooms through the RFID tags in their clothes and belongings? Where is [] outrage over BellSouth's patent-pending plans to pick through our garbage and skim the data contained in the RFID tags we discard?"