Microchips implanted in humans spark controversy

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself 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, 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 for the first time had 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 radio chip 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 and tradition 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 eventually would 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.

RFID chips are fixed to car windshields as toll-paying devices, on "contactless" payment cards (Chase's "Blink" or MasterCard's "PayPass"). They're embedded in Michelin tires, library books, passports, work uniforms, luggage and, unknown to many consumers, on a host of items from Hewlett Packard printers to Sanyo TVs at Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

But CityWatcher.com employees weren't appliances or pets: They were people made scannable.

"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 of CityWatcher.com dismissed 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. "You would think that we were going around putting chips in people by force, and that's not the case at all," he said.

Yet within days of the company's announcement, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the chip's implantation in people.

RFID, they warned, soon would enable the government to "frisk" citizens electronically — an invisible, undetectable search performed by readers posted at "hotspots" along roadsides and in pedestrian areas. It might even be used to squeal on employees while they worked: Time spent at the water cooler, in the bathroom or in a smoking area one day could be broadcast, recorded and compiled in off-limits, company databases.

"Ultimately, the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, 'Take a chip or starve,' " said Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in consumer education and RFID technology.

Some Christian critics saw the implants as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age of evil in which humans are forced to take the "mark of the beast" on their bodies to buy or sell anything.

Gary Wohlscheid, president of These Last Days Ministries, a Roman Catholic group in Lowell, Mich., put together a Web site that linked the implantable microchips to apocalyptic prophecy in the book of Revelation. "The Bible tells us that God's wrath will come to those who take the mark of the beast," he said. Those who refuse to accept the Satanic chip "will be saved," Wohlscheid said.

In post-9/11 America, electronic surveillance comes in myriad forms: in a gas station's video camera, a cell phone tucked inside a teen's back pocket, a radio tag attached to a supermarket shopping cart, 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, D.C.

RFID, in Steinhardt's opinion, "could play a pivotal role in creating that surveillance society."

In design, the tag is simple: A medical-grade glass capsule holds a silicon computer chip, a copper antenna and a capacitor that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader.

Implantations are quick, relatively simple procedures. After a local anesthetic is administered, a large-gauge hypodermic needle injects the chip under the skin on the back of the arm, midway between the elbow and the shoulder.