Implanted IDs: Click Here!

by B.K. Eakman

Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) announced in March that it had filed 
for FDA approval of its tiny ID implant, VeriChip, and the Florida-based 
company performed its first commercial implant on three local children 
on May 10, promising "easy access of medical records."  

While both announcements were greeted with surprise, ADS had 
already revealed that it had received the patent rights for VeriChip's 
prototype, Digital Angel - a miniature digital transceiver designed for 
implantation in the human body and powered electromechanically 
through muscle movement. Unlike other experimental implants created 
by competitors, ADS's was intended not merely to identify but to send 
and receive data and, eventually, to be able to track the implantee 
using Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology. For now, the sales 
hooks are "medical emergencies" and "identifying missing
persons," 
including soldiers in the field and corpses u particularly effective, 
given the nation's post-September 11 mentality.  

There have been many indications that "technology creep" would someday 
revolutionize our conceptions of what is personal and private for years, 
but legislators, in this information-based society, have been slow to 
sense the dangers of microchipping people.  

Most of us probably can tick off a long list of programs that started 
out as voluntary, temporary, or "pilot projects" but eventually morphed 
into permanent mandates, sometimes with draconian ramifications: the 
income tax, Social Security numbers, annual auto-emissions tests, 
psychological screening for school-children. Both the national 10 card 
and various universal health-care schemes were rejected over just such 
fears of arbitrary and dehumanizing applications, but both are about 
to sneak through the back door via the ID implant.  

By the time ADS mass markets VeriChip, bureaucrats will likely have 
scared young parents into microchipping their babies - right now, 
today, before your child gets swapped, stolen, kidnapped, into an 
accident, or lost! Will an "adult microchip," like today's beginners' 
driver's license, then become a rite of passage for teenagers?  

Shortly before Christmas 1993, a program to identify pets through chip 
implants was launched nationwide. Veterinarians and humane societies 
promoted the new devices, which were (and still are) implanted by 
means of a painless injection under the animal's skin. 

The pet chips provide only the basics - pet's name, owner's address,
vaccination dates, and vet - all readable with hand-held scanners. 
But if your pet is gone, so is your microchip. How exactly does this 
chip improve on a collar or dog tag?  

The pet program may have been less about finding Fido than about 
getting the bugs out of ID-implant technology. While data-collection 
techniques, consolidation, and cross-matching capabilities were 
exponentially expanding, the door was opened for the next logical 
step.  

In a 1993 speech entitled "Microchipped" (published as part of a book in 
1994), I predicted the first human ID implant incorporating tracking and 
cross-matching capability to be a mere decade away. Nine years later, 
Digital Angel is suddenly a big winner on the stock market. To attract 
investors, ADS has a website that hypes a variety of potential uses, 
from tamper-proof identifications to enhanced e-business security and 
the monitoring of serious medical conditions. ADS notes that the device 
can "be activated either by the 'wearer' or by the monitoring facility."  

Every news story missed that little fact. Most people would assume that 
the wearer and the purchaser are a "team," working on the same side. 
But who will really have control, not only over your whereabouts but of 
your privileged information? Whether it is school, airport, and building 
security; "red flagging" your banking transactions; facial-recognition 
systems in public places; e-mail intercept/recovery capability; laser 
scanners picking up cell-phone conversations; cameras mounted on the 
roadway; or computers logging everything from your urinary-tract 
infection to your rock-concert tickets, we are being acclimated to 
believe that, if we have nothing to hide, privacy is no big deal.  

Meanwhile, ever-increasing advances in computer cross-matching dog 
us wherever we go - from census, motor-vehicle, tax, title, and 
insurance databases to school records. The result is a burgeoning 
information industry of data traffickers and "brokers," licit and 
otherwise, all linking information to accommodate the needs of 
employers, credit bureaus, universities, police, corporate spies 
- and government. Not surprisingly, data-laundering has become a 
lucrative spin-off industry.  

The student who divulges on a school questionnaire which magazines, 
modem conveniences, and medications are in his home, or the vacation 
spots most frequented by family members, has no idea that this 
"lifestyle data" can be cross-matched with responses relating to 
social attitudes, worldviews, religion, and politics.  

At first, most analysts were interested in aggregate data to determine 
public-policy trends or to assess the results of advertising strategies 
aimed at specific demographic groups. But with government-mandated 
database consolidations, uniform codes, standardized definitions, and 
compulsory compatibility among local, state, and federal computers - 
ostensibly "to facilitate information-sharing" - it was only a matter 
of time before this technology targeted the individual.  

The new generation of ID implants holds a sizable paragraph of 
information. That one paragraph, however, is also capable of being 
linked with other information systems, and search-engine technology is 
outstripping the best expectations of even the experts. More ominous, 
information thought to be anonymous is readily identifiable. The term 
"confidential," in a legal context, has come to mean "need
to know."  

A statistical model can be created from computerized information to 
predict, sometimes with stunning accuracy, future reactions and 
behaviors using information from a person's past activities, ranging 
from responses on a survey to frequency of toll-free telephone usage 
to recurring trends in discretionary spending.  

As Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of the software giant, Oracle, 
explained in an interview on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, there are 
thousands of compatible databases that track and cross-reference 
generic information about people - their beliefs, family ties, friends' 
and associates' names, addresses, phone numbers, and aliases; 
political/civic clubs and associations joined; magazine and newspaper 
subscriptions; frequent shopping places; political campaigns and 
causes contributed to; how important a person is by region, state, 
or city; and criminal and medical histories, including potentially 
embarrassing information from long ago. Together, these can forecast 
a person's future actions.  

So where's the abuse?  

In 1995, the National Institutes of Health quietly provided a grant to 
the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic for a "Multi-site Multimodal 
Treatment Study of Children With ADHD." Among the significant aspects 
of the ensuing legal case was that kids who had not been labeled with 
any disorder were discovered to have been given a battery of psychological 
tests without informed consent from parents, and, worse, the collected 
data had been mixed not only with students' education records but with 
their medical records. Once caught, Western Psychiatric refused to share 
the information it had collected with parents, yet it was unable to prove 
that data on a particular child could not be retrieved at a later time, 
causing "compensable harm."  

Might not insurance companies, potential employers, or even a political 
opponent find such information useful down the road (e.g., a child having 
once been referred to a psychologist)? DNA microchipping and other 
implant technology have progressed in a similarly quiet manner, save a 
few occasional tidbits. For example, the Times of London reported in 
October 1998 that "[film stars and the children of millionaires [were] 
among 45 people, including several Britons . . . [who] have been fitted 
with chips (called the Sky Eye) in secret tests."  

/Continued/

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