http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1714256,00.html
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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".

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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.

The armed forces will discover that they are more useful than dog tags
for identifying injured soldiers or for tracking troops who are lost or
have been captured by the enemy. Prisons will soon come to the same
conclusion. Then sweatshops in developing countries will begin to catch
on. Already the overseers seek to control their workers to the second;
determining when they clock on, when they visit the toilet, even the
number of hand movements they perform. A chip makes all this easier. The
workers will not be forced to have them, any more than they are forced
to have sex with their bosses; but if they don't accept the conditions,
they don't get the job. After that, it surely won't be long before
asylum seekers are confronted with a similar choice: you don't have to
accept an implant, but if you refuse, you can't stay in the country.

I think it will probably stop there. I don't believe that you or I or
most comfortable, mentally competent people will be forced to wear a
tag. But itwill become an increasingly acceptable means of tracking and
identifying people who could be a danger to themselves, or who could be
at risk of sudden illness or disappearance, or who are otherwise hard
for companies or governments to control. They will, on the whole, be
people whose political voice is muted.

As it is with all such intrusions on our privacy, it won't be easy to
put your finger on exactly what's wrong with this technology. It won't
really amount to a new form of control, as all the people who accept the
implants will already be subject to monitoring or tracking of one kind
or another. It will always be voluntary, at least to the extent that
anything the state or our employers want us to do is voluntary. But
there is something utterly revolting about it. It is another means by
which the barriers between ourselves and the state, ourselves and the
corporation, ourselves and the machine are broken down. In that tiny
capsule we find the paradox of 21st-century capitalism: a political
system that celebrates choice, autonomy and individualism above all
other virtues demands that choice, autonomy and individualism are
perpetually suppressed.

While implanted chips will not lead to the mass scanning of the
population, another use of the same technology quite possibly will. At
the end of last month, a leaked letter from Andy Burnham, the Home
Office minister, revealed that the identity cards for which we will
involuntarily volunteer will contain radio frequency identification
chips. This will allow the authorities to read the cards with a scanner.
I propose that as the technology improves, the police will be able to
scan a crowd and (assuming everyone is carrying his voluntary-compulsory
ID card) produce a list of whom it contains. I further propose that it
will take only a year or two for this to seem reasonable.

Already we have become used to the police filming demonstrations for the
same purpose. When they started doing it, about 10 years ago, it caused
outrage. It gave us the impression that by protesting we became
suspects. But now we don't even notice them: even to the extent of
waving and shouting, "Hello, Mum". Like every other intrusion on our
privacy, they have become normal.

I also propose that the mass scanning these identification chips will
allow will be assisted by another kind of surveillance technology. Last
week, campaigners in west Wales obtained a letter sent by the Welsh
Development Agency to Ceredigion County Council. It revealed that the
agency, with the help of the European Union, is setting up an industrial
estate outside Aberystwyth. Its purpose is the "market acceleration" of
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). With the help of companies such as BAE
Systems, Rolls-Royce and our new friend Qinetiq, the agency hopes to
find the best way of encouraging the "routine operation of UAV systems
UK-wide". Ceredigion council's website lists various functions of the
UAVs, of which the first is "law enforcement".

So the police won't even have to be there. Someone sitting in a control
room could fly a tiny drone (some of them are just a few inches across)
equipped with a receiver over the heads of a crowd and, with the help of
our new identity cards, determine who's there. It sounds quite mad, just
as the idea of biometric identity cards in the UK once did. All these
new technologies somehow contrive to seem both wildly implausible and
entirely likely.

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.

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