One Generation Is All They Need for Big Brother To Microchip All

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*Life With Big Brother........

One Generation Is All They Need for Big Brother To Microchip All*

November 30, 2009

Kevin Haggerty
Spencer Wynn/Toronto Star

By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old
age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he
knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically
tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases
monitoring and recording his smallest behavioural traits.

Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified
disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology,
however, already exists. For years humane societies have implanted all
the pets that leave their premises with a small identifying microchip.
As well, millions of consumer goods are now traced with tiny radio
frequency identification chips that allow satellites to reveal their
exact location.

A select group of people are already "chipped" with devices that
automatically open doors, turn on lights, and perform other low-level
miracles. Prominent among such individuals is researcher Kevin Warwick
of Reading University in England; Warwick is a leading proponent of the
almost limitless potential uses for such chips.

Other users include the patrons of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona,
many of whom have paid about $150 (U.S.) for the privilege of being
implanted with an identifying chip that allows them to bypass lengthy
club queues and purchase drinks by being scanned. These individuals are
the advance guard of an effort to expand the technology as widely as
possible.

From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller,
less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the
wholesale "chipping" of Western citizens is not technological but
cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of
being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory.

Today we might strongly hold such beliefs, but sensibilities can, and
probably will, change. How this remarkable attitudinal transformation is
likely to occur is clear to anyone who has paid attention to privacy
issues over the past quarter-century. There will be no 3 a.m. knock on
the door by storm troopers come to force implants into our bodies. The
process will be more subtle and cumulative, couched in the unassailable
language of progress and social betterment, and mimicking many of the
processes that have contributed to the expansion of closed-circuit
television cameras and the corporate market in personal data.

A series of tried and tested strategies will be marshalled to
familiarize citizens with the technology. These will be coupled with
efforts to pressure tainted social groups and entice the remainder of
the population into being chipped.

This, then, is how the next generation will come to be microchipped.

It starts in distant countries. Having tested the technology on guinea
pigs, both human and animal, the first widespread use of human
implanting will occur in nations at the periphery of the Western world.
Such developments are important in their own right, but their
international significance pertains to how they familiarize a global
audience with the technology and habituate them to the idea that
chipping represents a potential future.

An increasing array of hypothetical chipping scenarios will also be
depicted in entertainment media, furthering the familiarization process.

In the West, chips will first be implanted in members of stigmatized
groups. Pedophiles are the leading candidate for this distinction,
although it could start with terrorists, drug dealers, or whatever
happens to be that year's most vilified criminals. Short-lived promises
will be made that the technology will only be used on the "worst of the
worst." In fact, the wholesale chipping of incarcerated individuals will
quickly ensue, encompassing people on probation and on parole.

Even accused individuals will be tagged, a measure justified on the
grounds that it would stop them from fleeing justice. Many prisoners
will welcome this development, since only chipped inmates will be
eligible for parole, weekend release, or community sentences. From the
prison system will emerge an evocative vocabulary distinguishing
chippers from non-chippers.

Although the chips will be justified as a way to reduce fraud and other
crimes, criminals will almost immediately develop techniques to simulate
other people's chip codes and manipulate their data.

The comparatively small size of the incarcerated population, however,
means that prisons would be simply a brief stopover on a longer voyage.
Commercial success is contingent on making serious inroads into tagging
the larger population of law-abiding citizens. Other stigmatized groups
will therefore be targeted. This will undoubtedly entail monitoring
welfare recipients, a move justified to reduce fraud, enhance
efficiency, and ensure that the poor do not receive "undeserved" benefits.

Once e-commerce is sufficiently advanced, welfare recipients will
receive their benefits as electronic vouchers stored on their
microchips, a policy that will be tinged with a sense of righteousness,
as it will help ensure that clients can only purchase
government-approved goods from select merchants, reducing the always
disconcerting prospect that poor people might use their limited funds to
purchase alcohol or tobacco.

Civil libertarians will try to foster a debate on these developments.
Their attempts to prohibit chipping will be handicapped by the inherent
difficulty in animating public sympathy for criminals and welfare
recipients � groups that many citizens are only too happy to see
subjected to tighter regulation. Indeed, the lesser public concern for
such groups is an inherent part of the unarticulated rationale for why
coerced chipping will be disproportionately directed at the stigmatized.

The official privacy arm of the government will now take up the issue.
Mandated to determine the legality of such initiatives, privacy
commissioners and Senate Committees will produce a forest of reports
presented at an archipelago of international conferences. Hampered by
lengthy research and publication timelines, their findings will be
delivered long after the widespread adoption of chipping is effectively
a fait accompli. The research conclusions on the effectiveness of such
technologies will be mixed and open to interpretation.

Officials will vociferously reassure the chipping industry that they do
not oppose chipping itself, which has fast become a growing commercial
sector. Instead, they are simply seeking to ensure that the technology
is used fairly and that data on the chips is not misused. New policies
will be drafted.

Employers will start to expect implants as a condition of getting a job.
The U.S. military will lead the way, requiring chips for all soldiers as
a means to enhance battlefield command and control � and to identify
human remains. From cooks to commandos, every one of the more than one
million U.S. military personnel will see microchips replace their dog tags.

Following quickly behind will be the massive security sector. Security
guards, police officers, and correctional workers will all be expected
to have a chip. Individuals with sensitive jobs will find themselves in
the same position.

The first signs of this stage are already apparent. In 2004, the Mexican
attorney general's office started implanting employees to restrict
access to secure areas. The category of "sensitive occupation" will be
expansive to the point that anyone with a job that requires keys, a
password, security clearance, or identification badge will have those
replaced by a chip.

Judges hearing cases on the constitutionality of these measures will
conclude that chipping policies are within legal limits. The thin veneer
of "voluntariness" coating many of these programs will allow the
judiciary to maintain that individuals are not being coerced into using
the technology.

In situations where the chips are clearly forced on people, the
judgments will deem them to be undeniable infringements of the right to
privacy. However, they will then invoke the nebulous and historically
shifting standard of "reasonableness" to pronounce coerced chipping a
reasonable infringement on privacy rights in a context of demands for
governmental efficiency and the pressing need to enhance security in
light of the still ongoing wars on terror, drugs, and crime.

At this juncture, an unfortunately common tragedy of modern life will
occur: A small child, likely a photogenic toddler, will be murdered or
horrifically abused. It will happen in one of the media capitals of the
Western world, thereby ensuring non-stop breathless coverage. Chip
manufactures will recognize this as the opportunity they have been
anticipating for years. With their technology now largely bug-free,
familiar to most citizens and comparatively inexpensive, manufacturers
will partner with the police to launch a high-profile campaign
encouraging parents to implant their children "to ensure your own peace
of mind."

Special deals will be offered. Implants will be free, providing the
family registers for monitoring services. Loving but unnerved parents
will be reassured by the ability to integrate tagging with other
functions on their PDA so they can see their child any time from any place.

Paralleling these developments will be initiatives that employ the logic
of convenience to entice the increasingly small group of holdouts to
embrace the now common practice of being tagged. At first, such
convenience tagging will be reserved for the highest echelon of Western
society, allowing the elite to move unencumbered through the physical
and informational corridors of power. Such practices will spread more
widely as the benefits of being chipped become more prosaic. Chipped
individuals will, for example, move more rapidly through customs.

Indeed, it will ultimately become a condition of using mass-transit
systems that officials be allowed to monitor your chip. Companies will
offer discounts to individuals who pay by using funds stored on their
embedded chip, on the small-print condition that the merchant can access
large swaths of their personal data. These "discounts" are effectively
punitive pricing schemes, charging unchipped individuals more as a way
to encourage them to submit to monitoring. Corporations will seek out
the personal data in hopes of producing ever more fine-grained customer
profiles for marketing purposes, and to sell to other institutions.

By this point all major organizations will be looking for opportunities
to capitalize on the possibilities inherent in an almost universally
chipped population. The uses of chips proliferate, as do the types of
discounts. Each new generation of household technology becomes
configured to operate by interacting with a person's chip.

Finding a computer or appliance that will run though old-fashioned
"hands-on"' interactions becomes progressively more difficult and
costly. Patients in hospitals and community care will be routinely
chipped, allowing medical staff � or, more accurately, remote computers
� to monitor their biological systems in real time.

Eager to reduce the health costs associated with a largely docile
citizenry, authorities will provide tax incentives to individuals who
exercise regularly. Personal chips will be remotely monitored to ensure
that their heart rate is consistent with an exercise regime.

By now, the actual process of "chipping" for many individuals will
simply involve activating certain functions of their existing chip. Any
prospect of removing the chip will become increasingly untenable, as
having a chip will be a precondition for engaging in the main dynamics
of modern life, such as shopping, voting, and driving.

The remaining holdouts will grow increasingly weary of Luddite jokes and
subtle accusations that they have something to hide. Exasperated at
repeatedly watching neighbours bypass them in "chipped" lines while they
remain subject to the delays, inconveniences, and costs reserved for the
unchipped, they too will choose the path of least resistance and get an
implant.

In one generation, then, the cultural distaste many might see as an
innate reaction to the prospect of having our bodies marked like those
of an inmate in a concentration camp will likely fade.

In the coming years some of the most powerful institutional actors in
society will start to align themselves to entice, coerce, and
occasionally compel the next generation to get an implant.

Now, therefore, is the time to contemplate the unprecedented dangers of
this scenario. The most serious of these concern how even comparatively
stable modern societies will, in times of fear, embrace treacherous
promises. How would the prejudices of a Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover,
or of southern Klansmen � all of whom were deeply integrated into the
American political establishment � have manifest themselves in such a
world? What might Hitler, Mao or Milosevic have accomplished if their
citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?

Choirs of testimonials will soon start to sing the virtues of implants.
Calm reassurances will be forthcoming about democratic traditions, the
rule of law, and privacy rights. History, unfortunately, shows that
things can go disastrously wrong, and that this happens with
disconcerting regularity. Little in the way of international agreements,
legality, or democratic sensibilities has proved capable of thwarting
single-minded ruthlessness.

"It can't happen here" has become the whispered swan song of the
disappeared. Best to contemplate these dystopian potentials before we
proffer the tender forearms of our sons and daughters. While we cannot
anticipate all of the positive advantages that might be derived from
this technology, the negative prospects are almost too terrifying to
contemplate.