Monbiot on RFIDs
George Monbiot has an article in today's Guardian about the emerging "radio frequency identification tags", used in one company in Ohio to identify two workers who are entitled to enter the strongroom. The chips are implanted under the skin to identify people, are getting cheaper, and have obvious ramifications for personal liberty:
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.
The article concludes on our country's muted response to the progressive erosion of our privacy and freedom and how our population is gradually submitting "to the demands of the machine".
Colleen Hammond (Catholic talk show host, writer and blogger) brought this up on her blog Dressing With Dignity in October 2004 (see here). I made the point in the comments to that entry that the same technology which is supposedly able to prevent children falling into the hands of undesirables could just as easily be used to trap children in abusive situations at the hands of their carers (the same could be true of elderly people) by making it easier for people to catch up with them when they run away. Of course, when the chips are implanted for "safety" reasons in childhood, they would end up remaining in the body for decades and so could be used to track them much later, for good or evil purposes.
