Barcoding humans
Pastor Dale Morgan
Barcoding humans*
The era of implanting people with identity chips is up on us
By Angela Swafford, Globe Correspondent
The painless procedure barely lasted 15 minutes. In his South Florida
office, Dr. Harvey Kleiner
applied a local anesthetic above the tricep of my right arm, then he
inserted a thick needle deep
under the skin.
''First we locate a prime spot,'' he said. ''The next thing is to
release the button that triggers the
injection mechanism, and that's it, the cargo's been delivered.''
The ''cargo'' was a half-inch-long microchip inside a glass and
silicone cylinder that carries my
permanent identification number. For an instant, I remembered the
famous scene in the movie
''Fantastic Voyage'' in which a miniaturized Raquel Welch and her
companions are inserted,
submarine and all, into the vein of a patient. In my case, the tiny
chip inside me can transmit
personal information to anyone with a special handheld scanner.
Theoretically, this VeriChip will allow doctors to call up my medical
records even if I'm too badly
hurt to answer questions. It is also supposed to allow me to get money
from an automatic teller
machine by flashing my arm instead of punching in my PIN number. Or
reassure airport security
that I am a journalist, not a terrorist.
And, though the VeriChip strikes critics as Orwellian, its makers think
the surgically implanted IDs
could be the Social Security numbers of the future in a nervous world.
''I believe the day will come when most of us will have something
similar to the VeriChip under our
skin,'' said Scott Silverman, president of Florida-based Applied
Digital Solutions. ''People will
regard that its benefits -- in terms of financial, security, and health
care -- far outweigh the
possibility of loss of privacy.''
Right now, I am part of a very small club, the 18th person in the world
-- and the first journalist --
to get ''chipped.'' Most of the others are ADS employees along with one
Florida family who have
been jokingly dubbed ''the Chipsons'' in a play on the old Jetsons
cartoon.
The idea of a system that gives emergency workers and others immediate
access to potentially
lifesaving information is exactly what drew the Jacobs family of Boca
Raton to the VeriChip. At the
request of their 14-year-old son, Derek, the Jacobses got chipped last
year.
''My husband has cancer and we've experienced the frustrating delays of
trying to provide urgent
medical history information every time he is rushed into the emergency
room,'' says Leslie Jacobs.
Since the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, she
continues, ''we know that our
lives are increasingly vulnerable. If we want increased safety,
security, and peace of mind, we need
to take positive steps. We've decided that having a VeriChip is one way
to do just that.''
But critics see surveillance technology like the VeriChip as a growing
threat, giving potentially
dangerous new power to businesses and government alike. In a report
issued in January by the
American Civil Liberties Union, Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt warned
that an explosion of
technology has already created a ''surveillance monster.''
''Scarcely a month goes by in which we don't read about some new
high-tech way to invade
people's privacy, from face recognition to implantable microchips, data
mining, DNA chips, and
even `brain wave fingerprinting,' '' they wrote. ''The fact is there
are no longer any technical barriers
to the Big Brother regime portrayed by George Orwell [in his novel
`1984'].''
The VeriChip is similar to the more than 25 million chips already
embedded in animals all over the
world acting as ''pet passports,'' allowing customs officials to
monitor those animals that do not
need to go into quarantine, or to identify your stray dog.
But, at least for now, the VeriChip does much less: it's mainly for
demonstration purposes, carrying
only an identification number and the capacity for about three
paragraphs of information. Only 10
hospitals and doctors in Florida have the scanner to read the chips.
And the Food and Drug
Administration has not yet approved the chips for use in health care,
so they cannot be used to
access medical records.
However, ADS officials say this is just the beginning. They want to
build a chip that can store loads
of information, or act as the key to a central database that stores
information about the user.
Ultimately, the company hopes to be able to track the movement of
people with chips worldwide
using global positioning satellites.
The company is field testing its Personal Locator Device, or PLD, which
ADS says could help
track lost children, sick elderly family members, mountain climbers who
get lost, or kidnap victims.
Company officials say they have been inundated with requests from
private companies in Latin
America, especially Mexico and Colombia.
The PLD is still years away from wide use, according to Keith Bolton,
ADS's chief of technologies.
The working prototype is rather large -- 2 1/2 inches in diameter --
and would require major
surgery for implantation (though it appears some Israeli secret service
agents already carry
something similar). It is powered by a pacemaker battery, and, just
like in a Tom Clancy book, it
would let anyone with access to the PLD system follow the wearer
anytime, anywhere in the world,
at the click of a mouse.
''The PLD would also monitor the vital signs of the wearer, and the
environmental conditions
around that person, and it could be a great way to protect a family
member with a disease such as
Alzheimer's,'' says Bolton.
Businesses already use technology to track their products around the
world, but we should stop
and think about the implications before starting a human tracking
system, cautions Mohan Tanniru,
professor of information systems at the University of Arizona.
''I am not going to put a chip on my kid thinking that she could be
kidnapped,'' he says, ''unless I
know the chip will be activated only if I report that my kid is lost.
But how do I know that the
police are only going to activate it when I say so, and not when they
feel like it? You can't just say
that technology is bad just because it is there. So it is a matter of
deciding what trusting agency
should be given that responsibility.''
Tanniru actually thinks that human tracking might be welcome in certain
cases, such as following
criminals on probation or making sure foreign nationals don't overstay
their visas. In fact, Pro Tech
Monitoring of Tampa already makes an externally worn tracking device
for parolees that alerts
authorities if the wearer enters a forbidden area, such as a school zone.
For ADS's Silverman, both the VeriChip and its future GPS-based version
are a matter of
individual choice.
''No one is forcing you to have a VeriChip. If you want a chip in your
right arm you are going to
know it is there because you will see it injected. When you look at the
events of 9/11 and the way
people measure their own personal security today versus the way they
did a few years ago, there is
a much higher concern to make sure that family members are safe and
sound, and some people
now put that above privacy rights.''
So far, ADS's technology gamble has not translated into profits. In
2002, ADS lost $112 million on
revenues of $96 million, though this loss is significantly lower that
that of the previous year.
As far as I am concerned, having a chip with a code in it is not giving
me the chills. I think it would
be nice to use it to get cash or pay for gas, and I wouldn't mind
paramedics having access to my
health records in the blink of an eye. Besides, I know it would never
get lost. I did, however, have
a few questions about its health hazards. So I asked Dr. Kleiner.
''The VeriChip is extremely safe,'' he says. ''Pacemakers are hundreds
of times larger and more
complicated and nobody has problems with them. To prevent the chip from
migrating to another
part of the body there is a little polymer at one end of the capsule
that will adhere to the skin and
hold it in place.
At his office, my arm was like a barcoded product at a supermarket cash
register: It beeped every
time the scanner prodded the chip. It worked even through my clothes.
Displayed on the screen
was a long number with many zeroes. For good or bad, I thought, this
chip may be quietly heralding
a time when people will literally have technology under the skin.