Thursday, June 1, 2006

Welcome to the Revolution

Depending on your personal and religious beliefs, this story could be more than a little troubling to you. I'm all for tracking the presence of 'guest-workers' inside the borders of the United States, but microchipping them is a bit much. Not because it allows us to track them, but because it sets a dangerous precendent.
Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company's RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. He made the statement on national television earlier this week.

Silverman was being interviewed on "Fox & Friends." Responding to the Bush administration's call to know "who is in our country and why they are here," he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, "We have talked to many people in Washington about using it…."

The VeriChip is a very small Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag about the size of a large grain of rice. It can be injected directly into the body; a special coating on the casing helps the VeriChip bond with living tissue and stay in place. A special RFID reader broadcasts a signal, and the antenna in the VeriChip draws power from the signal and sends its data. The VeriChip is a passive RFID tag; since it does not require a battery, it has a virtually unlimited life span.
Going one step further,
In a related story, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe allegedly remarked to visiting U.S. senators Jeff Sessions (Alabama) and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) that microchips could be used to track seasonal workers. "President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they are permitted to enter the U.S. for seasonal work," Specter told Congress on April 25.
Seasonal workers or not, chipping people like animals is a bad, bad move. It starts with non-citizens, but where does it end? People should not have to have something inserted into their bodies in order to come here to work. Simply following a legal process with some other form of identification ought to be enough. Has the government suddenly stopped believing it's own plans for an un-tamperable ID card are realistic?

If this takes hold, this is a step down a road we are going to regret travelling.

(Source: LiveScience.com)

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