Here's some slight good news on the VeriChip front. And I highly recommend the Spychips book by Katherine Albrecht.

California could become third state
to ban forced microchip tag implants (RFID)
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php

by Orr Shtuhl
Global Research, January 12, 2008

It would be an interesting feature of an employee's first day: sign a
contract, fill out a W-2 and roll up your sleeve for your microchip
injection.

Sounds like sci-fi, but it's happened, and now a handful of states are
making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip
implanted under their skin.

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signs a bill passed Sept. 4, California
would join Wisconsin and North Dakota in banning human implanting of these
tags without consent.
info.sen.ca.gov/pub/07-08/...asm_v95.pdf

No one's quite sure how real a threat these forced implants might be, or why
states are feeling compelled to protect their residents from being
physically tagged. Lawmakers are calling the legislation pre-emptive, while
the industry that produces the technology sees the states' action as fear
mongering.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags - tiny, data-storing microchips
about the size of a grain of rice - are in passports, in Wal-Mart factory
shipments and in subway passes in cities from New York to Taiwan. They are
also in humans. On one less-than-likely episode of "Law & Order: Special
Victims Unit," a paranoid actor Bob Saget even uses one to monitor his
adulterous wife.

Unlike Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is used for
constant, real-time tracking, RFID tags are scanned at close range - usually
from a few feet to a few inches. The tags are tracked by scanners installed
at checkpoints, such as office doors or warehouse loading docks. The systems
are also commonly used in highway toll collection and as theft protection in
car keys.

In humans, they have been used to store medical information, to track
movement and to gain access to locked rooms. To date, 2,000 RFID chips have
been sold for implantation in humans, says VeriChip Corp., the only
manufacturer with a Food and Drug Administration-approved implantable chip.
www.verichipcorp.com/

The company is focusing its technology on medical patient identification,
and about 400 patients, including those with Alzheimer's disease, have RFIDs
implanted. Other VeriChip human implants have been used by a Spanish
nightclub to allow VIPs with implanted chips to bypass entrance lines and by
the Mexico attorney general's staff to safeguard identity information at a
time when the kidnapping of government officials there is not uncommon.

Some customers are using them as high-tech keys. Ohio security firm
CityWatcher.com raised eyebrows in 2006 when it requested that some of its
employees be "chipped," or implanted with tags for access to certain rooms.
According to published reports, only two employees got the implants before
the company dropped the program. CityWatcher.com has since shut down.

But forced chipping has been a rare practice, leading some industry
spokespeople to decry regulation as "scare tactics."

Wisconsin enacted the first RFID ban in May 2006, and North Dakota in April.
www.legis.state.wi.us/2005/da...t482.pdf

Colorado and Ohio have bills in committee, and Oklahoma and Florida saw
theirs die last session.

Except for one U.S. House proposal to use RFID tags to track prescription
drugs, Congress has not widely addressed the technology.
www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/z

Legislators admit that the few laws being enacted are pre-emptive. Wisconsin
state Rep. Marlin Schneider (D) had never heard of CityWatcher.com when he
drafted the first implant ban.

"I had heard about this device from CNN or someplace, and I went into the
office and said, 'Get a bill drafted that prohibits this,'" he said. "This
is beyond even what Orwell imagined."

State Sen. Joe Simitian (D), who authored California's bill, said he first
looked into RFID legislation after grade schools in Sutter County, Calif.,
required students to wear IDs containing the chips to help monitor
attendance. The move prompted privacy complaints from parents, and the
school eventually stopped using the technology.

Simitian introduced four other RFID bills, dealing with criminal punishment
for identity theft, security standards and use of these tags in driver's
licenses and school IDs.

All four proposals were originally pieces of California's Identity
Information Protection Act of 2006, which passed but was vetoed by
Schwarzenegger. In a statement, he recommended waiting for standards from
the federal Real ID Act, a plan to organize states' driver's licenses into a
national system. The governor has until Oct. 14 to sign or veto the newly
passed bill. gov.ca.gov/pdf/press/sb_768_veto.pdf

The lack of security in the chips is particularly alarming, Simitian said,
and is a major reason he thinks the state should step in with regulation. A
May 2006 story in Wired Magazine featured Jonathan Westhues, a 24-year-old
engineer who demonstrated how he could (and did) covertly scan a company's
RFID employee badge and break into the office - all with a cheap, homemade
reader. www.wired.com/wired/archi...rfid_pr.html

He's since posted detailed instructions on how to make the reader on his Web
site. cq.cx/verichip.pl

Westhues likens RFID chips to "a repurposed dog tag. . The Verichip is built
with no attempt at security, and is therefore not very special to clone," he
writes on his Web site.

How low-tech are these homemade readers?
Determined to show the security flaws to skeptics in the Legislature,
Simitian asked a tech-savvy grad student from his office to build one. The
student then wandered the state Capitol one afternoon with the reader in his
briefcase. In the process, he stole the security numbers of nine
representatives. The reader could send out any of those numbers, getting him
past any locked door a state senator would have access to. And he would
appear as the senator in the electronic records.

Manufacturers and industry representatives say that no cases of such
identity theft have been documented. But depending on the desired level of
security, cameras and guards should be used in addition to RFID tags, says
the AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association).
www.aeanet.org/

The technology is being embraced by a few government agencies. Both Vermont
and Washington state have agreed to work with the Department of Homeland
Security to test RFID driver's licenses, although they won't be required by
citizens. The U.S. Department of Defense has been tracking shipments with
RFID tags since 2003.

Besides possible privacy breaches, the new technology also has raised health
alarms. Studies of implants used in the past 12 years have linked RFIDs to
cancer in lab mice and rats, according to The Associated Press.

The studies did not have control groups for the cancer, and manufacturers
report no complications with the millions of pets that have had various chip
implants over the last 15 years. But the results were enough for some
scientists to question the FDA's approval of the technology.


Contact Orr Shtuhl at editor@stateline.org.



Center for Research on Globalization
© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca