Chip Implants: Electronic Leash
Would Undermine Our Values
Source: SiliconValley.com
September 2, 2000
``They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.''
WHAT can grease the slippery slope toward tyranny, and
erode trust within families? Sometimes, it's as simple as parents'
love for their children.
A colleague and friend says he'd gladly implant a
location-tracking chip in his newborn daughter, to protect her from
kidnapping and other threats. He says he wouldn't misuse such
surveillance power. I'm sure he means it. I'm sure other parents would
say, and believe, the same things.
This location-tracking product does not exist -- yet.
Such is the race of technology, however, that it undoubtedly will
exist soon enough. By then, I hope my colleague and others in his
situation think hard about the consequences if they get what they
want.
You can't blame my colleague and people like him for
their wishes. They crave certainty. They want to minimize risk.
But this is an uncertain world. We accept risk in return
for civil and economic liberties that, on balance, produce the best
overall outcome for society.
Implanting tracking devices in human beings will not
ensure safety, because in practice the entire scheme is absurdly
flawed. Just as important, maybe more so, it violates essential
principles and values.
Before I explain why, let's separate some issues.
There's nothing objectionable about the general notion of implanting a
microprocessor-controlled device into a human body. Ask anyone whose
heart beats regularly with the help of a modern pacemaker.
Under certain circumstances, a location-tracking chip
would be a wonderful thing. If I were at high risk for a stroke or
heart attack, I would agree to implant a chip that would monitor
certain vital signs and send a message, including my location, to the
nearest emergency medical team. But I would
want an iron-clad guarantee that it could divulge my location only if
my life were at immediate risk.
Society already uses technology to keep track of the
whereabouts of convicted criminals who are under house arrest. Ankle
bracelets alert proximity detectors if the wearer has ventured beyond
a certain radius. It's not difficult to imagine a time when house
arrest means a temporary chip implant.
It's a long, long leap from there to putting chips into
human beings -- even into children we want to protect -- in the name
of safety.
Consider only a couple of the myriad practical flaws.
Can you imagine, for instance, how police departments across the
nation would react to the blizzard of false alarms that would arrive
as worried parents imagined that their children had ventured afield,
or had been kidnapped? The cops,
rightly, would stop responding without some way of ensuring that such
panic attacks had a basis in reality.
The idea that these implanted beacons could save a child
from a determined wrong-doer -- or from the child's own, sensible
desire to be free of the electronic leash, for that matter -- is also
specious.
The transmitter could be defeated by any number of
means, such as a well-shielded container that blocked the signal.
Black-market removals by trained professionals would become common.
Other potential methods of disabling or removing the chips are too
gruesome to discuss. Molesters may be evil, but we'd be foolish to
count on their stupidity. Children may
be parents' property under the law, but they're not helpless,
particularly when they reach their teens.
Now ponder the absolute certainty that parents would not
be the only people with access to the tracking data, and the abuses
that would certainly occur as a result. Tracking systems of this sort
would be centralize the data, then distribute it, creating a
tantalizing target for people who'd
misuse the information. Suppose a battered spouse took her
chip-implanted child to a shelter, and the batterer used the location
data to track them down?
Then there's law enforcement. Public safety people have
impossibly tough jobs at times, but history is littered with
law-enforcement corruption and wrongdoing. Do you imagine that the
police -- or anyone who could get a subpoena for whatever pretext --
would resist the chance to use this data?
You might think you had sole custody of the information, but you would
invariably be wrong.
The practical problems are enough to give any sensible
person pause. The principles are more important.
My colleague might, as he insists, use his
child-tracking powers only in extreme circumstances. Many other
parents would use the technology more freely. A few, no doubt, would
turn it into a 24-hour-a-day leash.
That wouldn't suffice, not for some. Why not implant a
device, equipped with a camera and microphone, that transmits
everything the child sees and hears? Why not insist on surveillance
cameras in all public places, with the data kept indefinitely so we
could see who was going where, and when? No,
this isn't possible today, but it will be.
Assume my colleague and his protective brethren stopped
with their location-tracking systems. They'd still do something
irreparable to the trust that ultimately must emerge between parent
and child.
The tether may hold. But it corrodes the soul.
Maybe children would grow up accustomed to the idea. If
so, kiss goodbye to our liberty. That generation of adults would see
nothing wrong with a pervasive surveillance society, and that's what
we would get. We would have forfeited our fundamental freedoms in
return for some illusory security.
Some people, reading this, will be thinking, ``But if an
embedded chip in every child saved even one life or prevented even one
case of abuse, it would be worth the cost.'' At the risk of being
accused, wrongly, of not caring about children, I have to say, with
some qualms at the way this may
sound, that it would not be worth the cost.
Risk is part of our lives. We don't insist that cars
protect humans from all injury in the event of a crash. The auto
companies could build such cars, but they'd be so expensive to buy,
operate and maintain that few people could afford them.
Our criminal justice system accepts some risks for the
sake of a relatively free society. We don't allow the police to
torture suspects to obtain confessions. That pesky Fifth Amendment of
the Constitution, which forbids the authorities from forcing people to
incriminate themselves, does mean that some criminals go free. Ditto
for the presumption of innocence,
which in theory forces prosecutors in criminal trials to prove their
case beyond a reasonable doubt.
We aren't allowed to jail people for crimes they might
commit. We don't allow the police to wiretap people, at least not
legally, without sufficient cause to persuade a judge that the spying
is warranted.
In other words, we have agreed to be somewhat less safe
in order to be vastly more free.
I don't like the idea of a single person, child or
adult, being harmed by criminals. I've been the victim of several
crimes that might have been solved with pervasive surveillance. But
the methods that might have brought several criminals to justice would
have been more damaging to all of
us.
I admire my colleague's devotion to his daughter's
well-being. I fear for her future, for the world she'll live in, if he
gets his wish.
Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and
Friday.
Visit Dan's online column, eJournal:
weblog.mercurycenter.com/ejournal
by Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
http://www.mercurycenter.com/partners/distribution/docs/dg09032000.htm
-- Benjamin Franklin
E-mail: dgillmor@sjmercury.com;
Phone: (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.
PGP fingerprint: FE68 46C9 80C9 BC6E 3DD0 BE57 AD49 1487 CEDC 5C14.