Microchip implants spark privacy worry
Security measure may lead to tracking

Associated Press | July 3, 2007

By Todd Lewan

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms.

The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs -- radio frequency identification tags -- as long as two grains of rice and as thick as a toothpick, was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said.

"To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," said Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There's a reader outside the door. You walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door."

Innocuous? Maybe.

But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age.

To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention, a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer's patients and allow consumers to buy their groceries with the wave of a chipped hand.

To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased, without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else.

Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer's patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens -- until one day a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged.

The concept of making all things traceable isn't alien to Americans. Thirty years ago, the first electronic tags were fixed to the ears of cattle to permit ranchers to track a herd's reproductive and eating habits. In the 1990s, millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, dogs, cats, even racehorses.

Microchips are now fixed to car windshields as toll-paying devices. They are embedded in Michelin tires, library books, passports, work uniforms, luggage, and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a host of individual items, from Hewlett-Packard printers to Sanyo TVs, at Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

But CityWatcher.com employees are not appliances or pets.

"It was scary that a government contractor that specialized in putting surveillance cameras on city streets was the first to incorporate this technology in the workplace," said Liz McIntyre, co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID."

Darks, the CityWatcher.com executive, dismissed his critics, noting that he and his employees had volunteered to be chip-injected. Any suggestion that a sinister, Big Brother-like campaign was afoot, he said, was hogwash.

In post-9/11 America, electronic surveillance comes in myriad forms: in a gas station's video camera, in a radio tag attached to a supermarket shopping cart, in a Porsche automobile equipped with a LoJack anti-theft device.

"We're really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action -- some would even claim, our very thoughts -- will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.

VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans. More than one-tenth of those have been in the U.S., generating "nominal revenues," the company acknowledged in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in February.

Although in five years VeriChip has yet to turn a profit, it has been investing heavily, as much as $2 million a quarter, to create new markets.

The company's present push: tagging of "high-risk" patients such as diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease.

Recently, there have been rumors on Wall Street and elsewhere of the potential uses for RFID in humans: the chipping of U.S. soldiers, of inmates, or of migrant workers, to name a few.

To date, none of this has happened. But a large-scale chipping plan that was proposed illustrates the stakes, pro and con.

In mid-May, a protest outside the Alzheimer's Community Care Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., drew attention to a 2-year study in which 200 Alzheimer's patients, along with their caregivers, were to receive chip implants. Parents, children and elderly people decried the plan, with signs and placards.

The media attention sent VeriChip's stock soaring 27 percent in one day.

"VeriChip offers technology that is absolutely bursting with potential," wrote blogger Gary Sattler, of the AOL site Bloggingstocks, even as he recognized privacy concerns.

As the polemic heats up, legislators are increasingly being drawn into the fray. Two states, Wisconsin and North Dakota, recently passed laws prohibiting the forced implantation of microchips in humans. Others -- Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado and Florida -- are studying similar legislation.