This morning, I was listening to Air America and a news report during the Al Franken show gave me pause. The report was on a company in Ohio which is currently implanting silicon chips in its workers for so-called security concerns. The chips came from a corporation which is selling chips as a cheaper alternative to other security devices like optical scanners and as a more surefire alternative to ID cards which can be lost or stolen. (More specific information can be found on cnn.com:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/02/13/security.chips.ap/?section=cnn_tech Notice that the story is in the Technology section and not Politics or Law. )
What amazed me was the matter of fact way in which the report was given on Air America, an allegedly liberal network. There was no outcry, no shock. The chips were considered just a new type of technology, not a cause for alarm over privacy rights. There was a brief interview with an ACLU representative who raised concern about privacy rights, but the corporation selling the chip technology assured the radio interviewer that the implantation of the chips was purely voluntary. When I heard this, I began to think of REAL ID which, in theory, is "voluntary" on the part of states, but it is clear that states will be denied Federal funding if they fail to go along. Even worse, the citizens in states without Real ID will be treated as if they have no ID at all. In essence, "voluntary" is obligatory when all is said and done.
I remember back in the 90s, there was discussion of possible chip implantation in every person; the practice of implanting chips had just begun on animals (pets, who could be traced if lost by the presence of these chips). The hottest discussions of chip implantation were going on in right wing "wacko" circles, which made it easy to ignore for mainstream "non-wacko" people. But now, it seems that chip implantation is coming as a requirement to work. It may take some time to catch on, although we can imagine circumstances--real or created--which might precipitate chip implantation sooner.
We can add this kind of bodily invasion by the government to the loss of privacy in other bodily arenas, like abortion rights and contraception, and electronic camera recording of our persons in such innocuous locations as supermarkets and shopping malls. Taken with the recent eminent domain decision on the part of the Supreme Court (which basically takes away ownership, making us all renters) and the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the arrest of a protester who was protesting outside of a "free speech" zone, all of this means that the basis of our Constitution has been undermined.
What seems to be coming in a post-democracy world is the new "prison society" in which a captive middle and working class, endlessly monitored through devices planted on their persons, through devices the have to have like the internet and credit cards which will allow all purchases (hence lifestyle) to be monitored, and the devices employed by others (like security cameras). The purpose of all this monitoring is not about the enemy from without but about controlling massive numbers of people in a new global economy. The age of the Prison Society has begun.
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