RE: "if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"

["Gary Funck" <gary () intrepid com>]

"The creeping extension of implantation technology will eventually break
down all the barriers between us and the state ..."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1714256,00.html

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 21, 2006
The Guardian

It received just a few column inches in a couple of papers, but the story I
read last week looks to me like a glimpse of the future. A company in Ohio
called City-Watcher has implanted radio transmitters into the arms of two of
its workers. The implants ensure that only they can enter the strongroom.
Apparently it is "the first known case in which US workers have been tagged
electronically as a way of identifying them".

The transmitters are tiny (about the size of a grain of rice), cheap (£85
and falling fast), safe and stable. Without being maintained or replaced,
they can identify someone for many years. They are injected, with a local
anaesthetic, into the upper arm. They require no power source, as they
become active only when scanned. There are no technical barriers to their
wider deployment.

The company that makes these "radio frequency identification tags", the
VeriChip Corporation, says they "combine access control with the location
and protection of individuals". The chips can also be implanted in hospital
patients, especially children and people who are mentally ill. When doctors
want to know who they are and what their medical history is, they simply
scan them in. This, apparently, is "an empowering option to affected
individuals". For a while, a school in California toyed with the idea of
implanting the chips in all its pupils.

A tag such as this has a maximum range of a few metres. But another
implantable device emits a signal that allows someone to be found or tracked
by satellite. The patent notice says it can be used to locate the victims of
kidnapping or people lost in the wilderness. There are, in other words,
plenty of legitimate uses for implanted chips. This is why they bother me. A
technology whose widespread deployment, if attempted now, would be greeted
with horror, will gradually become unremarkable. As this happens, its
purpose will begin to creep.

At first the tags will be more widely used for workers with special security
clearance. No one will be forced to wear one; no one will object. Then
hospitals - and a few in the US are already doing this - will start scanning
their unconscious or incoherent patients to see whether they have a tag.
Insurance companies might start to demand that vulnerable people are
chipped.

The armed forces will discover that they are more useful than dog tags for
identifying injured soldiers or for tracking troops who are lost or have
been captured by the enemy. Prisons will soon come to the same conclusion.
Then sweatshops in developing countries will begin to catch on. Already the
overseers seek to control their workers to the second; determining when they
clock on, when they visit the toilet, even the number of hand movements they
perform. A chip makes all this easier. The workers will not be forced to
have them, any more than they are forced to have sex with their bosses; but
if they don't accept the conditions, they don't get the job. After that, it
surely won't be long before asylum seekers are confronted with a similar
choice: you don't have to accept an implant, but if you refuse, you can't
stay in the country.
[...]
There will be no dramatic developments. We will not step out of our homes
one morning to discover that the state, or our boss, or our insurance
company, knows everything about us. But, if the muted response to the ID
card is anything to go by, we will gradually submit, in the name of our own
protection, to the demands of the machine. And it will not then require a
tyrannical new government to deprive us of our freedom. Step by voluntary
step, we will have given it up already.

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