* Original Area: POLITICS
* Original To  : Steve Asher (1:396/45)

This is continued from previous post

 Part two:

 Left-Behinders, libertarians right to fear VeriChip

 By Rod Dreher / The Dallas Morning News


 Consider: You're in a car accident in a faraway city and are
 brought to the hospital unconscious.  You are highly allergic to
 a certain drug, but you have no way of telling that to the ER
 physicians, who want to use that drug to save your life.  Time
 is running out.  If you had the chip, the doctors would know
 what to do.  Who wouldn't want a chip in a case like that?

 There are consumer benefits, too.  What if all you had to do was
 hold your arm out and be scanned by the bartender at your favorite
 nightclub whenever you wanted a cocktail or a burger?

 VIP customers at the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona already have
 that option, thanks to an injectable debit-card VeriChip the club
 offers its most fashionable clients.  According to Conrad Chase,
 the club's director, "The objective of this technology is to bring
 an ID system to a global level that will destroy the need to carry
 ID documents and credit cards."

 Makes sense, using the chip to do all your buying and selling.
 Think of the convenience.  Think of the security.

 Speaking of security, Applied Digital's chief technology officer
 has described the post-9-11 environment as an opportunity, saying,
 "When people are trying to regain their peace of mind, they're more
 open to new approaches."

 The company already has invented a system that allows satellites
 to track the radio signal of subdermal microchips.  If a terrorist
 sets off a suitcase nuke in an American city, federal authorities
 will demand that everybody have a trackable ID chip - and most of
 us, hysterical over the prospect of more homeland Hiroshimas, will
 gratefully comply.

 You don't want the chip?  What are you, a terrorist?
 Come with us, sir, we'd like to talk to you.

 In that event, the only thing standing between Big Brother and
 the rest of us will be the ACLU diehards and right-wing Christians
 who have a fundamental conviction that to accept the ID chip would
 mean submission to the Antichrist.  And when that day comes, you can
 expect the establishment to marginalize them all as anti-science
 religious kooks and political paranoids whose intransigence
 endangers us all.

 Whatever you think of their theology, the deep and abiding fear
 these religious believers have of global identification technology
 in the hands of government is eminently sane.  You don't have to
 read the Book of Revelation like they do to know that these folks
 are rightly reading the signs of the times.



Rod Dreher is an assistant editorial page editor of
The Dallas Morning News.

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