This makes me sick to think that people are willing to do this to themselves. WHY????? Chips: High-tech aids or tools for Big Brother? Debate rages over proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies 
Demonstrators prepare to march against microchip implants planned for Alzheimer's patients, in front of the Alzheimer's Community Care Headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla. March organizer Katherine Albrecht, left, said a prayer before starting the march.
View related photos
var hasRelatedPhotos = 'false';if (hasRelatedPhotos=='true'){var vRPL = document.getElementById("viewRelatedPhotosLink");if (vRPL!=undefined) vRPL.style.display = "";var vLRPG = document.getElementById("linkRelatedPhotos");var vLIRPG = document.getElementById("linkImgRelatedPhotos");if (vLRPG) {if(vLIRPG) vLIRPG.href=vLRPG.href;}}Gary I. Rothstein / AP
getCSS("4010972") MSN Tech and Gadgets
</IMG>
The well-equipped student Should a 10-year-old have a cell phone? Fine-tune your HDTV's settings
var cssList = new Array();getCSS("3053751")
Tips to protect your identity, password dos and don'ts, fraud statistics and more. 
var cssList = new Array();getCSS("3053751") Related Stories
|
What's this? Library Renovation
var cssList = new Array();getCSS("3053751") Most popular
• Most Viewed<IMG height=1 width=2 scr="/images/cleardot.gif">• Top Rated<IMG height=1 width=2 scr="/images/cleardot.gif">• Most E-mailed
Tourists fined for cycling nude in Serbia Lindsay Lohan arrested for alleged DUI Sister of suicide victim sues ‘Dateline’ Tom Cruise — ‘the Goebbels of Scientology’? Chips: High-tech aids or tools for Big Brother? Most viewed on MSNBC.com For teens with cancer, one night of normal He Only Saved a Billion People NBA star risks everything for daughter’s health Part 5: Soldier’s charitable spirit survives Mars rovers are staying alive despite storms Most viewed on MSNBC.com Zero calories, same great taste (and heart risks) Chips: High-tech aids or tools for Big Brother? Tourists fined for cycling nude in Serbia The Freewheelers Lindsay Lohan arrested for alleged DUI Most viewed on MSNBC.com
pop_pushTabBox('boxB_3053751');
var cssList = new Array();getCSS("3053751") RSS feeds on msnbc.com
Add these headlines to your news reader
Security 
Learn more about RSS
By Todd Lewan
Updated: 4:38 p.m. MT July 23, 2007
function UpdateTimeStamp(pdt) { var n = document.getElementById("udtD"); if(pdt != '' && n && window.DateTime) { var dt = new DateTime(); pdt = dt.T2D(pdt); if(dt.GetTZ(pdt)) {n.innerHTML = dt.D2S(pdt,((''.toLowerCase()=='false')?false:true));} } } UpdateTimeStamp('633208271312600000');
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,” Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. 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.”
Story continues below ↓ advertisement ad_dap('250','300','&PG=NBCTN2&AP=1089');
Innocuous? Maybe.
But the news that Americans had, for the first time, 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.
High-tech helper or Big Brother?
To some, the microchip 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, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, 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 would eventually 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.
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, pets, even racehorses.
getCSS("3088867")
NBC video
Alternative to nursing home care?
July 23: Is a tracking option available to seniors a viable, future option? NBC's Robert Bazell reports.
Nightly News
Microchips are now 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 and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a host of individual items 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,” says Liz McIntyre, co-author of “Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID.”
Darks, the CityWatcher.com executive, said his employees volunteered to be chipped. “You would think that we were going around putting chips in people by force,” he told a reporter, “and that’s not the case at all.”
Yet, within days of the company’s announcement, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchip’s implantation in people.
“Ultimately,” says Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in consumer education and RFID technology, “the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, ’Take a chip or starve.”’
Some 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. Others saw it as a big step toward the creation of a Big-Brother society.
'Surveillance society'
“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,” says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C.
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.
Click for related content
Discuss: What do you think of 'scannable humans?' Top search engines tighten privacy policies Special report: Privacy Lost
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.
John Halamka, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston got chipped two years ago, “so that if I was ever in an accident, and arrived unconscious or incoherent at an emergency ward, doctors could identify me and access my medical history quickly.” (A chipped person’s medical profile can be continuously updated, since the information is stored on a database accessed via the Internet.)
Deanna~ Banded April 19th, 2007~305.5/183
/170
