I just saw a segment on CNN that claimed that about 800 individuals currently have tiny rice-sized identity chips inplanted under their skin. This device is common for pets these days, so I was not surprised by the technology. I was surprised that so many people had adopted it since I’ve never heard of a scanner/screener situation that looks for a human ID chip. But I’m probably wrong.
So, who is out there using these chips and why? Is it a high-level clearance thing? The military? Is anyone being forced to get them for, say, employment reasons?
(Let’s not debate the whole “Big Brother” argument here, okay folks? There are plenty of extra electrons to open your own thread in GD if you want. And for the record, I’m all for the ID chips, so don’t interpret this post as disguised outrage. If I knew they could make my life easier or safer I’d get one myself, no sweat.)
I have heard of parents using this and similar technologies with their small children to help identify them in cases where the children become crime victims.
Just yesterday there was a CEO of a company that makes sub-cutaneous chips on CNBC (might have been the CEO of Verichip). The chip is implanted in the tricep and is coated with something to cause scar tissue to form to prevent the chip from migrating through the body. He mentioned that there is a dance club/bar (in Europe?) that is using the chips, by scanning them with some kind of … scanning device. The information on the chips includes the implantee’s favorite drink, and I think there’s some way to charge the drinks to the chip.
Presumably, these chips could eventually eliminate the need for identification and credit cards because the information would be stored in the chip. Proponents say that it would curtail identity theft and fraud.
Of course, they would have a heck of a time trying to convince all consumers to use it. Fundamentalist Christians are terrified by the very idea: they think it fits the “Mark of the Beast” as foretold by Revelation. They warn in dire tones that the chip will soon be compulsory, completely ignoring the fact that we have a Constitution.
The people in the story could be test-market subjects-- to see if the chip is in any way medically objectionable. (I.E, causing skin ulcers or other unpleasant side effects.) They could also be using it to try out the feasibility on a limited basis.
These are cheap passive devices. It is inexpensive to read the code and somewhat inexpensive to create duplicates. They are OK for identifying pets because there is little profit to be made or advantage to be gained by trying to sneak the wrong pet through the pound. But if people are using these as identification in the ways we use identification now there is a large incentive to forge them.
I’ve seen disucssions of using them on folks with conditions like advanced Alzheimer’s, so if the person wanders off and gets lost but is unable to identify themselves there’s a means of finding out who they are and where they should be.
To be fair, the prophecy of the Mark of the Beast is one of the most insightful predictive statements on the human condition in any literature, ancient, sacred or otherwise. Further, the belief in the general tendency of humanity towards such a situation is hardly confined to fundamentalist Christians, but then “fundamentalist Christians” has become a blanket term for a particular kind of idiot, hasn’t it, rather than taking into account the differences in attitude, politics and intellectual belief among the great many believers who identify as fundamentalists under one banner or another. Besides which, I’m more or less fundamentalist and I am not terrified of the “very idea”. I think such identifying systems are cool and funky, it’s just that I also think their development is one of the things which meaningfully punctuate humanity’s slow spiral towards the necessary and predictable intervention of God.
As for the US Constitution, y’know… stuff changes. The world changes. I’m hardly the first person to point that out.