US debate over Microchip Implants in humans
Pastor Dale Morgan
US debate over Microchip Implants in humans*
5 Aug 2007, 0209 hrs IST,AP
MIAMI: CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted
little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had
glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their
arms.
The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs — radio frequency
identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a
toothpick — was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held
sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security
beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said. "To protect
high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean
Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He
compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There’s a
reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under
it, and it opens the door." Innocuous? Maybe.
But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with
electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the
proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their
ability to erode privacy in the digital age.
To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention — a high-tech helper
that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help
authorities identify wandering Alzheimer’s patients, allow consumers to
buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand. To
others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from
centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go
and do as they pleased without being tracked, unless they were harming
someone else.
Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer’s patients or
Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then
parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal immigrants — until one day, a
majority of people in the United States, falling into one category or
another, would find themselves electronically tagged. Thirty years ago,
the first electronic tags were fixed to the ears of cattle, to permit
ranchers to track a herd’s reproductive and eating habits. In the 1990s,
millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, pets, even
racehorses. Microchips are now fixed to car windshields as toll-paying
devices, on "contactless" payment cards. They’re embedded in Michelin
tires, library books, passports and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a
host of individual items at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. But City-Watcher.com
employees weren’t appliances or pets: They were people, made scannable.