Chip Implants: Big Brother's Last
Laugh?
Source: Salon
September 7, 2000
Soon you can have a tracking chip implanted in your
body. Is this a great technological breakthrough -- or Big Brother's
last laugh?
Worry no more, doting parents! Whether it's your
little pumpkin's first day walking home from school by herself or the
millionth time you've lost her at the mall, the BabysitterTM will
track your sweetpea's location from a jelly bean-sized microchip
implant, discretely tucked under her collarbone. You'll be able to
chart her every move. What
better way to give her independence, and put your mind at ease?
Also available: The Constant CompanionTM lets you keep a
watchful eye on grandma or grandpa, even when you can't be by their
side; The Invisible BodyguardTM offers freedom from fear so you can
enjoy the fauna and foliage when eco-tourism takes you to kidnapping
hot spots around the globe. Coming soon: The INS Border PatrollerTM;
the Maximum Security GuardTM; the
Personal Private EyeTM; the Micro-ManagerTM.
Alas, this is not as far-fetched or as futuristic as it
sounds. The whoa-dude notion of surveillance chips being installed in
human beings is poised to cross over from the realm of science fiction
into everyday reality, and soon. One technology with the deliciously
sci-fi name of the "Digital Angel," a prototype of which will be
unveiled next month, could be implanted under the skin and used to
monitor not only the
chip-wearer's location, but vital signs like heart rate and body
temperature. Other devices, worn externally like bracelets or pagers,
are already in use and invite us to embrace electronic monitoring in
specific environments -- like a theme park, college campus or
construction site -- for our fun, health or
safety.
What's disturbing is just how quickly these devices,
which only recently would have been laughed off as a cyborg fantasy,
are becoming accepted. Amazingly, it was but two years ago that a
British cybernetics professor pulled what then seemed like a
futuristic stunt; temporarily installing electronics in his arm to
control his computer remotely.
Now having a personal chip is becoming, well, not quite
the norm but a ready possibility. Kevin Warwick, the cybernetics prof,
says, "As the topic becomes more accessible in the media, people get
used to the idea; it's not such a frightening thing ... If it's not
there this year, it's only a
year or two downstream." A Japanese firm is already testing chips to
track lost relatives. And the New York Times, in a nod to what its
editors imagine the future might hold now that the human genome
project is complete, asked several designers to suggest how we might
carry around a chip encoded with our unique genetic sequence "for
perfect identification in matters medical,
official, criminal or otherwise." Some of the possibilities portrayed
in the July 9 Sunday magazine: a "decoder" ring, an implant in the
human iris to be read with a retinal scanner, even an oval-shaped
"genegg" for the belly button.
With commercial interests hard at work to spread the
gospel of human tracking and monitoring -- voluntarily, and for our
own good, of course, and others normalizing chip implantation, it
might not be too soon to start preparing for a whole new silicon
craze. Excuse me, but is that a chip in your ass?
Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology already
exists to track us wherever we might care to go -- the problem is
keeping the sensor up and running, giving off signals all the time
from inside of our bodies. Thus far, the biggest technological
challenge is energy; a tracking chip needs a power source. Think how
annoying it would be to have to plug your arm
into the wall to recharge yourself like a pesky cellphone; besides, it
would make it near-impossible to thwart kidnappers or retrieve lost
kiddies if rescuers didn't find the missing before the charge died.
There's also the vexing dilemma of getting the chip and its power
source small enough for comfort
and aesthetics. Who wants an unsightly chip bulge?
Chris Hables Gray, an associate professor of computer
science and the cultural study of science and technology at the
University of Great Falls in Montana, says that researchers have been
working to find just such a small,
self-generating power source by tapping everything from body heat to
the electrical pulses in the muscles. There's even been talk of
putting teensy-weensy nanotechnology machines to work as miniature
waterwheels in the bloodstream so the heart itself could be the power
source. The heart running your chip: It's practically poetic.
But now one company claims that it has cracked this
power-source conundrum, and that it has a patent on the solution,
although executives won't yet reveal the technical details of how it
actually works. Applied Digital Solutions didn't invent it, but
purchased the patent for a "personal
tracking and recovery system," which the company has dubbed Digital
Angel.
According to CEO Richard Sullivan, Digital Angel
combines GPS wireless communications with biosensors, powered by body
heat in the form of a dime-sized chip, which can be embedded in a
watch, bracelet or medallion, even under your flesh -- should the FDA
approve such an invasive thing.
"It's like a live radio signal all the time," he says.
Sullivan sees a $100 billion potential market for the technology,
which is still under development with help from researchers at
Princeton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The
company will hold a gala in New York in
October to show off the prototype, and try to drum up investment to
finance actual products.
And the potential applications, should the thing
actually work as the company claims it does? Just use your
imagination, folks. Sullivan envisions kiddies having their own
Digital Angels watching over them in case of a snatching. Or,
caretakers installing them in patients with Alzheimer's disease to
prevent the old folks from wandering off. And just wait
until the military gets a load of this -- one in every soldier to
track not only their whereabouts, but their very mortality, in real
time. The same would go for employees in extremely hazardous
workplaces, such as nuclear power plants.
Come to think of it, a medallion worn around the neck
that's powered by your very body heat doesn't seem any more invasive
than some of the things that companies already do to their employees,
so why not a chip in every last cube!? Better still, dispense with
those pesky keycards to get in and out of
the office, and just have the whole thing implanted in your left butt
cheek.
If you're not already wondering how you and your loved
ones made it this far without a single chip implant, just consider all
the medical applications. Picture a system that would constantly
monitor a heart disease sufferer's pulse rate or a diabetes patient's
sugar levels and notify medical help when
things were looking dangerous. We accept pacemakers as a necessary and
important technology to extend and enhance the quality of lives. How
is this any different?
Sullivan brushes off concerns about privacy by promising
that the chip-wearer will be able to control when he or she is, uh,
switched on or off, although he won't yet say how exactly that will
work. The Digital Angel Web site puts it bluntly: "The unit can be
turned off by the wearer, thereby
making the monitoring voluntary. It will not intrude on personal
privacy except in applications applied to the tracking of criminals."
Maybe so, but the potential for abuse is so ludicrously
high that it's almost impossible to overstate. You can just see the
Michael Douglas-Sharon Stone Hollywood version, where the jealous
husband gives an opulent anniversary watch with the chip inside it to
his cheating wife, so he can obsessively monitor her movements, her
body temperature, the very
acceleration of the pounding of her heart rate ... until she figures
it out, and puts the chip to work -- against him.
To makers of tracking technologies, these Big Brother
worst-case scenarios sound like the same griping that has met all
sorts of other advancements we now blithely accept, like Social
Security numbers, credit cards that catalog our every purchase and
even e-mail.
"We believe that the benefits of the technology to a
parent looking for a child at a theme park or a student feeling safe
walking across campus, far outweigh some of those concerns," says Tom
Turner, senior vice president of marketing and business development
for a company called WhereNet, which
makes a technology that can be used to find people or objects in a
specific, local environment. "It's individual choice."
So far, WhereNet has licensed its technology to
companies that make bracelets worn on the wrist or pager-like devices
carried in a pocket or purse. It's in use at a water park in Denver
and on the campuses of the University of South Florida in Tampa and
the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Turner sees a future for
such gadgets on cruise ships, in gated
communities and at shopping malls.
Brendand Fitzgerald, the president of Microgistics,
which makes WalkMate, the device used by college students to alert
campus police if they're in danger, also thinks the benefits are
greater than the risks. "If you were
working in a hazardous industrial environment, you would want to know
that you could push a button and have someone help you if you need
help. 'I fell into the vat of boiling acid!'" Safety first is a logic
that's hard to argue with, even when it starts to veer from help when
you need it to totally transparent surveillance when you're at work.
And, like almost everyone else I talked to in this
field, Applied Digital Systems' Sullivan dismisses nagging doubts
about what it means to literally wire ourselves up. "By our own
nature, we tend to avoid things we know the least about and gravitate
towards those that we do know. Some of the things
that have made the most positive contributions to our lives are the
things that there are the most concern about. Like any technology,
it's really in the hands of the user," he says. Translation: it's
Galileo vs. the church all over again.
OK, Dr. Jekyll, you've convinced me. I'm ready for my
implant. Let me be the first to sign up for my very own chip body
modification. What list do I put my name on? In fact, I want my chip
secured on the outside of my skin where I can show it off to everyone
as a sign of just how wired I've become --
surely it will be the next big thing filling the void left by the
waning trendiness of tattoos, piercing, scarification: chipification.
However fashionable or discreet tracking devices might
become, not everyone is titillated by the possibilities. "I think most
people would be repulsed
by the idea. This is just a sort of modern version of tattooing
people, something that for obvious reasons -- the Nazis tattooed
numbers on people -- no one proposes," says Bob Gellman, a Washington
privacy consultant. "You can do anything you want voluntarily. You can
tattoo a bar code on your forehead if you want."
But the real question, as he sees it, is who will be
able to demand that a chip be implanted in another person -- a parent
in a child; a prison in an inmate; the INS in an undocumented illegal
alien found in the country; an employer in an employee as a condition
of being hired?
"I'm sure there's a strong argument that implanting a
chip in a person is unconstitutional. It would be cruel and unusual
punishment," he says. And for now the legal and social questions of
who could turn such a chip on or off and who would have access to the
information generated by such a
chip is "a totally unexplored area," says Gellman, adding: "And
probably one better off left unexplored."
Others see the chipification of humans as all but
inevitable. Chris Hables Gray, professor, self-proclaimed
"cyborgologist" and author of the forthcoming book "Cyborg Citizen,"
says that it really doesn't matter
whether or not the "Digital Angel" flies in October. "If this company
doesn't do it, someone else will," he says. And watch out when they
do.
"They will start implanting them in prisoners, parolees,
child abusers, sex offenders and drunk drivers," he predicts. Gray
says that it's been a military project for some 20 years to find a way
to track every soldier on the battlefield. Remember when Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh
complained having been a part of a Gulf War experiment that implanted
a chip in his butt? "McVeigh kept saying that he was being controlled
by a chip in his ass," says Gray. The cyborgologist isn't saying he
believes the bomber, of course, but cites circumstantial evidence that
the military may have been
experimenting with such tracking devices, and "if the military starts
to say we will put these chips into every Marine's ass, they have no
protection from that."
No matter how creepy we find the prospect of such a
technology, we can't stop its creation -- nor would we necessarily
want to. "Technology is continually trumping the constitutional
guarantees that we have," says Gray. He'd like to see protections
against the misuse of such chips as they become
commercially available: "Citizens could ask for a law that made it a
crime to put these into a person without their permission, and to
forbid, under any conditions, for the government to put these into
prisoners, parolees, illegal aliens, soldiers, citizens." He's even
proposed -- "only half joking" -- a "Cyborg Bill of Rights" to help
ensure that "new technologies are chosen democratically and we do not
have to accept every new technology
that invades our freedoms."
Meet Gus, the cyberkitty
All paranoia and conspiracy theories aside, it's
alarming how quickly a new technological "option" becomes a
requirement. The microchipping of pets is a case in point.
Take Gus, a 14-year old Balinese blue-point cat with a
bad habit of running away from home. "He's a conniving little runt,"
says his owner, David Huffman, affectionately. "He's a little man in
a cat suit that escapes
anytime he has the chance."
The wily kitty refuses to be saddled by a collar with an
identification tag. "He just pulls it off. I don't know how he does
it. He's a nudist," huffs Huffman. After the naked cat's fifth recent
breakout, when Huffman went to pick up the critter at San Francisco
Animal Care and Control, a staffer
gently recommended that he have his wanderlusty pet technologically
enhanced, for the animal's own good, of course.
Gus now sports a tiny microchip, which was implanted in
his shoulder with a syringe and identifies him -- permanently. "Cat
modification!" exclaims Huffman, with geeky glee -- he's a dot-com
CEO.
The way this cat-chipping works is really quite simple.
Gus has an id number (No. 401 278 486B) embedded under his skin on a
microchip about the size of a grain of rice. Huffman's address and
contact information are kept in a
database, maintained by the American Kennel Club so if the footloose
cat is picked up by a vet or shelter anywhere around the country he
could theoretically be scanned, matched with his owner in the database
and reunited. The scanner sends a radio wave to the microchip and
activates it to respond with the info.
More than 670,000 animals -- including no less than
134,007 cats, 54 pot-bellied pigs and five emu -- have been enrolled
in the American Kennel Club program so far, and almost 35,000 lost
pets have been recovered, according to the organization. Huffman
shelled out $70 for the "installation," which took just a few minutes,
and paid a $12.50 enrollment
fee to keep his info in the contact database. "Gus has no choice. It's
a violation of his animal civil liberties. He calls the ACLU all the
time," he kids. "This is like kitty Lojack," boasts Huffman of his
"cyberkitty's" techno body modification.
All the strays adopted from the San Francisco animal
shelter now have such identification chips implanted under their skin.
According to the American Kennel Club, a number of localities --
Columbia, S.C.; Indianapolis, Ind.;
Albuquerque, N.M.; and Dade County, Fla.; among them -- have adopted
ordinances requiring such chip implants. What has been a novelty is
now required.
Nevermind some animal organizations' skepticism about
the effectiveness of using a microchip to bring home a lost pet, and
the grousing of grumpy cultural commentators -- like National Public
Radio's Andrei Codrescu, author of a collection of essays entitled
"The Dog with a Chip in his Neck" -- who mock the chip-enhanced furry
friend as yet another symptom of the idiocy of modern life.
Better still, Applied Digital Solutions, the company
behind the "Digital Angel," is in the process of acquiring Destron
Fearing, one of the main creators of the chips for animals, to create
a kind of monster surveillance technology company.
Huffman is unmoved by the creepy overtones of
"improving" a cat with a chip: "He's a cyborg. But we all are," he
muses. "I use a cellphone, and drive a car. That makes me a cyborg.
He's just a more fully integrated cyborg." In fact, Huffman, who heads
a Bay Area start-up called Linkify says that
he wouldn't mind being a bit more fully integrated himself. How would
he feel about having a chip implanted in him? "If I ever had amnesia,
then they could tell me who I was. That might not be a bad idea," he
says.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/09/07/chips/index.html