When it won't need a tyranny to deprive us of our freedom

[Briar]

When it won't need a tyranny to deprive us of our freedom

The creeping extension of implantation technology will eventually break down all the barriers between us and the state

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 21, 2006
The Guardian


It received just a few column inches in a couple of papers, but the story I read last week looks to me like a glimpse of the future. A company in Ohio called City-Watcher has implanted radio transmitters into the arms of two of its workers. The implants ensure that only they can enter the strongroom. Apparently it is "the first known case in which US workers have been tagged electronically as a way of identifying them".

The transmitters are tiny (about the size of a grain of rice), cheap (£85 and falling fast), safe and stable. Without being maintained or replaced, they can identify someone for many years. They are injected, with a local anaesthetic, into the upper arm. They require no power source, as they become active only when scanned. There are no technical barriers to their wider deployment.
The company that makes these "radio frequency identification tags", the VeriChip Corporation, says they "combine access control with the location and protection of individuals". The chips can also be implanted in hospital patients, especially children and people who are mentally ill. When doctors want to know who they are and what their medical history is, they simply scan them in. This, apparently, is "an empowering option to affected individuals". For a while, a school in California toyed with the idea of implanting the chips in all its pupils.

A tag such as this has a maximum range of a few metres. But another implantable device emits a signal that allows someone to be found or tracked by satellite. The patent notice says it can be used to locate the victims of kidnapping or people lost in the wilderness. There are, in other words, plenty of legitimate uses for implanted chips. This is why they bother me. A technology whose widespread deployment, if attempted now, would be greeted with horror, will gradually become unremarkable. As this happens, its purpose will begin to creep.

At first the tags will be more widely used for workers with special security clearance. No one will be forced to wear one; no one will object. Then hospitals - and a few in the US are already doing this - will start scanning their unconscious or incoherent patients to see whether they have a tag. Insurance companies might start to demand that vulnerable people are chipped.

...

There will be no dramatic developments. We will not step out of our homes one morning to discover that the state, or our boss, or our insurance company, knows everything about us. But, if the muted response to the ID card is anything to go by, we will gradually submit, in the name of our own protection, to the demands of the machine. And it will not then require a tyrannical new government to deprive us of our freedom. Step by voluntary step, we will have given it up already.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1714255,00.html

[Arkansas Granny]

1. With the proliferation of security cameras in public places, the

willingness of some in the U.S. to allow warrantless surveillance by the government on phone calls, emails, etc., the scenario described in the article you reference seems closer every day. And the logic that will be used is something we are already hearing today: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." This is a chilling prediction.

[Briar]

2. I agree

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" is the attitude of tyrannies that want to decree how we should live and think and behave. It's the attitude of the government that put a two way television screen into Winston Smith's rooms in "1984". Winston's fate was sealed when he found a way to hide what he was doing (writing individual thoughts in a diary) from that all-seeing eye. From then on, he had something to worry about.

People are blundering towards a moment when they will totally change the relationship between the individual and his or her society. The moment when we will no longer be able to count on being assumed innocent, but when we will be assumed guilty until we have proved it (by exposing our whole lives to scrutiny).