|
This chip is in the shoulder
Winnipeg Free Press
Focus, Wednesday, August 24, 2005, p. a10
Dallas Hansen
Former Bush administration Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy
Thompson has one. Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo and his staff
do too. Jack Schmidig, chief of police in Bergen County, N.J., got his
in April. The Jacobs of Boca Raton, Fla., were the first family to wear
it, and the VIP patrons at Barcelona's Baja Beach nightclub are queuing
up for it. In fact, according to Applied Digital Solutions CEO Scott R.
Silverman, at least 2,000 technophiles have had a VeriChip implanted
beneath their skin.
At the Baja Beach club, scanners read your implanted VeriChip -- a
radio frequency identification device (RFID) no bigger than a rice
grain -- much as an Interac machine reads your debit card. The scanners
identify you and debit your account according to what you drink.
Applied Digital's press releases extoll the "enormous, untapped
potential for VeriChip as a personal verification technology that could
help to curb identity theft and prevent fraudulent access to banking
(especially via ATMs) and credit card accounts."
Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved VeriChip
for use inside humans, Mr. Thompson, having recently joined Applied
Digital's board of directors, sees boundless potential for growth in
this publicly traded company. Silverman says that by 2007 some 200
emergency wards around the U.S. will have installed VeriChip's
proprietary equipment for scanning the chips, providing doctors with
instant access to patients' medical histories.
Not only will the elderly be protected from the dangers of delayed or
incorrect identification, but newborns, too, stand to benefit from the
technology -- never again will anyone bring home the wrong baby. Infant
abductions? A thing of the past.
Chipped at birth takes on a frightful new context when VeriChip is
considered in tandem with Applied Digital's sister product, Digital
Angel -- a personal location device that remotely monitors human vital
signs while enabling its wearer to be tracked via global positioning
system satellites.
In my ignorant optimism, I had believed that public opinion would have
made impossible in my lifetime the widespread use of microchips inside
humans. Recently, however, I found a CNN poll from December 2000
revealing that 51 per cent responded "Yes" to the question "Would you
be willing to implant a chip in your body?"
Civil libertarians fear governments and corporations may end up
coercing employees into accepting implants. Having a social security
number, they observe, was once voluntary and optional. Conrad Chase,
owner of the Baja Beach nightclub, has said that in the near future
admittance to his bar will be by microchip only. He mentioned, too,
that a conversation with VeriChip official Keith Bolton revealed the
Italian goverment plans to chip its entire workforce. Yet Marlin
Schneider, of the Wisconsin state assembly, has introduced a bill
banning coercive chipping.
Other concerns are less political than theological. With the potential
for an implanted RFID chip to replace the cards we carry for our
medical, driving, and banking information, many Christians, especially
in America, envision a near future of mandatory microchipping. Chip
implants are thought to represent the mark of the beast from Revelation
13, describing a time "that no man might buy or sell, save he that had
the mark."
Secular conspiracy theorists have joined the fundamentalists in
believing a satanic cabal known as the Illuminati plan to microchip the
American population.
Adding further fuel to the fires of conspiracy theory is a widely
circulated Oct. 22, 2002, spam e-mail from the web domain
illuminatiorder.org, advising its recipients to invest in ADSX -- then
selling at 47 cents a share. "It is an Illuminati stock which will make
you a great deal of money while it was under $1," claims the e-mail.
Last Wednesday, ADSX closed at $2.87 a share.
Regardless of whether ADSX's primary shareholders dabble in necromancy,
there's no question holders of this technology stock would love to see
the VeriChip become the next iPod.
Applied Digital is making it easy this autumn, touring America to bring
the chipping experience to neighbourhoods in a giant recreation vehicle
called the ChipMobile. Certainly a global system of tracking and
identifying the population portends a technological totalitarianism
compared to which Orwell's Ingsoc look weak, but how long before
someone you know is bragging about his implant? Later, what becomes of
the refuseniks?
Category: Editorial and Opinions
Uniform subject(s): Computer and electronics industries
Length: Medium, 583 words
© 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All rights reserved.
www.dallashansen.com |
|
|
|
