By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases monitoring and recording his smallest behavioural traits.
Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology, however, already exists. For years humane societies have implanted all the pets that leave their premises with a small identifying microchip. As well, millions of consumer goods are now traced with tiny radio frequency identification chips that allow satellites to reveal their exact location.
A select group of people are already "chipped" with devices that automatically open doors, turn on lights, and perform other low-level miracles. Prominent among such individuals is researcher Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England; Warwick is a leading proponent of the almost limitless potential uses for such chips.
Other users include the patrons of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, many of whom have paid about $150 (U.S.) for the privilege of being implanted with an identifying chip that allows them to bypass lengthy club queues and purchase drinks by being scanned.
These individuals are the advance guard of an effort to expand the technology as widely as possible.
From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale "chipping" of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory.
Today we might strongly hold such beliefs, but sensibilities can, and probably will, change.
How this remarkable attitudinal transformation is likely to occur is clear to anyone who has paid attention to privacy issues over the past quarter-century.
There will be no 3 a.m. knock on the door by storm troopers come to force implants into our bodies. The process will be more subtle and cumulative, couched in the unassailable language of progress and social betterment, and mimicking many of the processes that have contributed to the expansion of closed-circuit television cameras and the corporate market in personal data.
A series of tried and tested strategies will be marshalled to familiarize citizens with the technology. These will be coupled with efforts to pressure tainted social groups and entice the remainder of the population into being chipped.
This, then, is how the next generation will come to be microchipped.
It starts in distant countries. Having tested the technology on guinea pigs, both human and animal, the first widespread use of human implanting will occur in nations at the periphery of the Western world.
Such developments are important in their own right, but their international significance pertains to how they familiarize a global audience with the technology and habituate them to the idea that chipping represents a potential future.
An increasing array of hypothetical chipping scenarios will also be depicted in entertainment media, furthering the familiarization process.
In the West, chips will first be implanted in members of stigmatized groups.
Pedophiles are the leading candidate for this distinction, although it could start with terrorists, drug dealers, or whatever happens to be that year's most vilified criminals.
Short-lived promises will be made that the technology will only be used on the "worst of the worst." In fact, the wholesale chipping of incarcerated individuals will quickly ensue, encompassing people on probation and on parole.
Even accused individuals will be tagged, a measure justified on the grounds that it would stop them from fleeing justice. Many prisoners will welcome this development, since only chipped inmates will be eligible for parole, weekend release, or community sentences. From the prison system will emerge an evocative vocabulary distinguishing chippers from non-chippers.
Although the chips will be justified as a way to reduce fraud and other crimes, criminals will almost immediately develop techniques to simulate other people's chip codes and manipulate their data.
The comparatively small size of the incarcerated population, however, means that prisons would be simply a brief stopover on a longer voyage. Commercial success is contingent on making serious inroads into tagging the larger population of law-abiding citizens. Other stigmatized groups will therefore be targeted. This will undoubtedly entail monitoring welfare recipients, a move justified to reduce fraud, enhance efficiency, and ensure that the poor do not receive "undeserved" benefits.
Once e-commerce is sufficiently advanced, welfare recipients will receive their benefits as electronic vouchers stored on their microchips, a policy that will be tinged with a sense of righteousness, as it will help ensure that clients can only purchase government-approved goods from select merchants, reducing the always disconcerting prospect that poor people might use their limited funds to purchase alcohol or tobacco.
Civil libertarians will try to foster a debate on these developments. Their attempts to prohibit chipping will be handicapped by the inherent difficulty in animating public sympathy for criminals and welfare recipients — groups that many citizens are only too happy to see subjected to tighter regulation. Indeed, the lesser public concern for such groups is an inherent part of the unarticulated rationale for why coerced chipping will be disproportionately directed at the stigmatized.
The official privacy arm of the government will now take up the issue. Mandated to determine the legality of such initiatives, privacy commissioners and Senate Committees will produce a forest of reports presented at an archipelago of international conferences.
Hampered by lengthy research and publication timelines, their findings will be delivered long after the widespread adoption of chipping is effectively a fait accompli. The research conclusions on the effectiveness of such technologies will be mixed and open to interpretation.
Officials will vociferously reassure the chipping industry that they do not oppose chipping itself, which has fast become a growing commercial sector. Instead, they are simply seeking to ensure that the technology is used fairly and that data on the chips is not misused. New policies will be drafted.
Employers will start to expect implants as a condition of getting a job.
The U.S. military will lead the way, requiring chips for all soldiers as a means to enhance battlefield command and control — and to identify human remains. From cooks to commandos, every one of the more than one million U.S. military personnel will see microchips replace their dog tags.
Following quickly behind will be the massive security sector. Security guards, police officers, and correctional workers will all be expected to have a chip. Individuals with sensitive jobs will find themselves in the same position.
The first signs of this stage are already apparent.
In 2004, the Mexican attorney general's office started implanting employees to restrict access to secure areas. The category of "sensitive occupation" will be expansive to the point that anyone with a job that requires keys, a password, security clearance, or identification badge will have those replaced by a chip.
Judges hearing cases on the constitutionality of these measures will conclude that chipping policies are within legal limits. The thin veneer of "voluntariness" coating many of these programs will allow the judiciary to maintain that individuals are not being coerced into using the technology.
In situations where the chips are clearly forced on people, the judgments will deem them to be undeniable infringements of the right to privacy. However, they will then invoke the nebulous and historically shifting standard of "reasonableness" to pronounce coerced chipping a reasonable infringement on privacy rights in a context of demands for governmental efficiency and the pressing need to enhance security in light of the still ongoing wars on terror, drugs, and crime.
At this juncture, an unfortunately common tragedy of modern life will occur:
A small child, likely a photogenic toddler, will be murdered or horrifically abused.
It will happen in one of the media capitals of the Western world, thereby ensuring non-stop breathless coverage.
Chip manufactures will recognize this as the opportunity they have been anticipating for years.
With their technology now largely bug-free, familiar to most citizens and comparatively inexpensive, manufacturers will partner with the police to launch a high-profile campaign encouraging parents to implant their children "to ensure your own peace of mind."
Special deals will be offered. Implants will be free, providing the family registers for monitoring services. Loving but unnerved parents will be reassured by the ability to integrate tagging with other functions on their PDA so they can see their child any time from any place.
Paralleling these developments will be initiatives that employ the logic of convenience to entice the increasingly small group of holdouts to embrace the now common practice of being tagged.
At first, such convenience tagging will be reserved for the highest echelon of Western society, allowing the elite to move unencumbered through the physical and informational corridors of power. Such practices will spread more widely as the benefits of being chipped become more prosaic. Chipped individuals will, for example, move more rapidly through customs.
Indeed, it will ultimately become a condition of using mass-transit systems that officials be allowed to monitor your chip.
Companies will offer discounts to individuals who pay by using funds stored on their embedded chip, on the small-print condition that the merchant can access large swaths of their personal data. These "discounts" are effectively punitive pricing schemes, charging unchipped individuals more as a way to encourage them to submit to monitoring.
Corporations will seek out the personal data in hopes of producing ever more fine-grained customer profiles for marketing purposes, and to sell to other institutions.
By this point all major organizations will be looking for opportunities to capitalize on the possibilities inherent in an almost universally chipped population. The uses of chips proliferate, as do the types of discounts. Each new generation of household technology becomes configured to operate by interacting with a person's chip.
Finding a computer or appliance that will run though old-fashioned "hands-on"' interactions becomes progressively more difficult and costly. Patients in hospitals and community care will be routinely chipped, allowing medical staff — or, more accurately, remote computers — to monitor their biological systems in real time.
Eager to reduce the health costs associated with a largely docile citizenry, authorities will provide tax incentives to individuals who exercise regularly. Personal chips will be remotely monitored to ensure that their heart rate is consistent with an exercise regime.
By now, the actual process of "chipping" for many individuals will simply involve activating certain functions of their existing chip.
Any prospect of removing the chip will become increasingly untenable, as having a chip will be a precondition for engaging in the main dynamics of modern life, such as shopping, voting, and driving.
The remaining holdouts will grow increasingly weary of Luddite jokes and subtle accusations that they have something to hide. Exasperated at repeatedly watching neighbours bypass them in "chipped" lines while they remain subject to the delays, inconveniences, and costs reserved for the unchipped, they too will choose the path of least resistance and get an implant.
In one generation, then, the cultural distaste many might see as an innate reaction to the prospect of having our bodies marked like those of an inmate in a concentration camp will likely fade.
In the coming years some of the most powerful institutional actors in society will start to align themselves to entice, coerce, and occasionally compel the next generation to get an implant.
Now, therefore, is the time to contemplate the unprecedented dangers of this scenario. The most serious of these concern how even comparatively stable modern societies will, in times of fear, embrace treacherous promises. How would the prejudices of a Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, or of southern Klansmen — all of whom were deeply integrated into the American political establishment — have manifest themselves in such a world? What might Hitler, Mao or Milosevic have accomplished if their citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?
Choirs of testimonials will soon start to sing the virtues of implants. Calm reassurances will be forthcoming about democratic traditions, the rule of law, and privacy rights. History, unfortunately, shows that things can go disastrously wrong, and that this happens with disconcerting regularity. Little in the way of international agreements, legality, or democratic sensibilities has proved capable of thwarting single-minded ruthlessness.
"It can't happen here" has become the whispered swan song of the disappeared.
Best to contemplate these dystopian potentials before we proffer the tender forearms of our sons and daughters. While we cannot anticipate all of the positive advantages that might be derived from this technology, the negative prospects are almost too terrifying to contemplate.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/136744
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Would an implanted chip help to keep my child safe?
May 15, 2007
In the wake of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, every type of child monitoring device is in demand
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article1788169.ece
UK. Microchip identification for children..
by Tobias Cunningham
May 18, 2007Europe's largest newspaper the London Times has come out with an article that I and many others who have their eyes open to the New World Order agenda have been expecting over the past 2 weeks since the tragic abduction of four-year-old Leicestershire toddler Madeleine McCann.
That article is the imminent push for our children to have implantable microchips embedded under their skin.
The majority of the British public and indeed that of the wider international community, particularly those with childten will willingly take in what the press subconciously tells us when these kinds of seemingly caring journalists step up and ask questions such as "Would an implanted chip help to keep my child safe?".
People with children are going to answer yes to this question. The majority of those without children are still going to answer yes to this question. The reason for this is that they fail to see the underlying motives behind the seemingly rational suggestion that we should all know where our children are and therefore ensure they are safe.
Of course we want our children to be safe. Of course we want them to be kept well away from the grips of an abductor such as the person or persons who have taken young Madeleine in Praia da Luz and of course we want these kinds of people brought to swift justice, but microchipping the entire child population is certainly not the answer and it simply never will be.
As Aaron Russo revealed on the Alex Jones show in January of this year, the true intentions of the global elite, in particular the Rockefeller family, is a microchipped society. A society where you have no privacy, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, whether you're innocent, guilty, indifferent or impaired. This is the true face of the London Times article quoted above and this is what we have to fight.
Let me make myself clear. On the surface this idea, be it for children only, is a good one. The reasoning sounds good, the media feeds it to you and your emotions lead you to believe that this is the way forward. But the notion that these chips are "just for children, to keep them safe" is a theory which will eventually evaporate if this plan comes to true fruition.
Hear this. Your child has been implanted with a microchip. You, the police and the government can track your child wherever he or she goes. Good idea? "Of course," you think to yourself, "my child will never be lost againand if the worst comes and my child is taken, the police can identify exactly where they are and locate them immediately.
But what about when your child grows up. Your child is now a teenagerthey're still chippedthey're still trackable by the police and the government and they still lack the privacy and freedom that was so readily taken away from them in the name of safety when they were in their early years of life.
But that's even if this system would work.
The UK Government's own research shows that CCTV is not a crime deterrent, yet here in the UK we have 1 camera for every 14 people and there are tonnes more going up all around us.
We are the most surveilled nation on the planet, yet we have one of the biggest crime ratesand that is simply because the CCTV that plagues your everyday lifethe CCTV that watches you almost every step you walk on every day of your life is not there to prevent crime or preserve public safety as the nice yellow stickers will have you believe. They are their to serve the purpose they were built for. To watchwatch YOU!
Make no mistake, the New World Order's plan to microchip the entire human population will begin in this manner. With children. If it were ruled tomorrow that every child on the planet should be microchipped from this point on then where will Earth be in say 50 years down the line? An almost entirely microchipped population. Everyone trackable. This is what we have to fight, because it is wrong in every single way. There are better ways to help keep our children safe from the evils that lurk in our world.
I sincerely hope that the McCann family have their daughter returned to them safe and well as does the rest of our nation and the rest of the world who have seen this case unfold over the past fortnight.
http://www.helium.com/items/343031-uk-microchip-identification-for-children
State Owned Hospital Plans to Implant Microchips in Babies
1) See TIME MAGAZINE, August 9, 1999.
Tucked inside article about baby swapping victims at University of Virginia hospital, as a parenthetical, is news that the University of Virginia hospital plans to begin micro-chipping all newborns in their bellybuttons this month to prevent baby snatching, etc. I can tell you now, as an attorney, exactly what is shaping up.
Parents who balk at this procedure or attempt to forbid it will be the subject of Child Protective Services (Family Independence Agency in Michigan) petitions with the court to remove the infant from them on the grounds that a) they fail to offer the child necessary safety and security by denying them by reason of fanatical, "conspiratorial", paranoid,
delusional, apocalyptic beliefs, this basic protection.
THey've been doing this to balking pet owners for some time now. What made us think we wouldn't be next. Even as they label people who fear the microchip implantation dangerous, they are carrying out the operations. Our people should expect to be marginalized and know how to combat it. In case you
don't get it, here is a copy below:
LAW
AUGUST 9, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 6
Cradles of Contention
The celebrated switched girls have got on swimmingly, so why are their
elders at war?
BY ANN BLACKMAN/CHARLOTTESVILLE
Rebecca Chittum and Callie Conley will always be known as the switched-at-birth kids. But do they know it themselves? Depends on who's doing the raising. Becca, as her family calls her, has no inkling of the infamous switch. "She doesn't understand. It's too early to tell her," says Tommy Rogers, her "grandfather," that is, the father of Whitney Rogers, the
woman who brought Becca home from the University of Virginia Medical Center in July 1995.
Meanwhile, the woman who took Callie home from the same hospital prides herself on telling her "daughter" the truth. Calling the four-year-old to the phone last week during an interview, Paula Johnson said, "Can you tell me whose belly you were born in?" Callie's reply: "In
Mommy Whitney's." Johnson continues, "And how did you come home with me?" Callie answers, "In the car."
Callie's biological parents, Whitney Rogers and Kevin Chittum, were killed in a traffic accident on July 4, 1998, just days before they would have learned of the switch.
And in mourning the young parents, there had been some hope that Callie and Becca's accidentally conjoined clans could let the girls share their lives together. A month after the deaths, the Chittums and the Rogerses, who share the care of Rebecca, and Johnson met and seemed to get along. The girls went swimming together in a family pool. Then Callie spent a week visiting Becca's extended family. "It went great," Tommy Rogers says. Both sides decreed that the girls would continue to live with all the families raising them.
Within months the truce was over.
Each side filed court papers seeking custody of both girls.
Johnson turned down a $2 million settlement offer from the state, saying it was not enough, and is suing the state-owned University of Virginia Medical Center for $31 million. She is also attempting to block a settlement for Rebecca reached by the Chittums, Rogerses and the state for the same reason. The case is on appeal before the Supreme Court of Virginia. Johnson's attorney, John Blakely, did not return phone calls last week seeking comment. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend, Carlton Conley, is suing the state and hospital officials for $4 million. He triggered the discovery of the switched babies when he balked at more child support for Callie. To certify his paternity, he had his blood tested. The results: not only wasn't he Callie's father, but Paula Johnson was not her mother.
Johnson also has a lawsuit against the makers of the identification bracelets used to keep track of patients. She charges that the babies' bracelets were so loose that they slipped off their wrists and ankles. (This month the medical center will begin to implant electronic bellybutton chips on newborns. Alarms will sound if a baby is taken through restricted doors.)
Finally, two of Callie's biological aunts, who helped care for the child last summer, have filed for visitation rights.
The families have stopped talking. "Me, myself, my days of speaking to Paula are over," Tommy Rogers tells TIME. "Paula wants everything--all the money, both kids. I reckon you get greedy sometimes." Johnson has a different view.
"Things just deteriorated over time, and it's got worse," she tells TIME. "No, it doesn't have nothing to do with money, not on my part anyway." Why does she think she is entitled to custody of Rebecca as well as Callie?
"Being a mother, maybe my maternal instincts kicked in," Johnson says. "She's my daughter. I gave birth to her. I carried her for nine months. I want her, and that's that."
The two girls appear to be oblivious to the wrangling. Tommy Rogers says Becca is a backyard daredevil on her blue-and-orange Big Wheel cycle, a sparkling child with a taste for pepperoni pizza, who is "growing like a little weed." Callie, meanwhile, looks forward to starting preschool this fall. And Paula Johnson is already making the child a regular on the local beauty-pageant circuit. Callie was recently a contestant in a Richmond pageant, winning the titles Miss Photogenic and Miss Personality. Says Johnson: "Callie's doin' real good."
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/microchips_in_babies.htm
Tucked inside article about baby swapping victims at University of Virginia hospital, as a parenthetical, is news that the University of Virginia hospital plans to begin micro-chipping all newborns in their bellybuttons this month to prevent baby snatching, etc. I can tell you now, as an attorney, exactly what is shaping up.
Parents who balk at this procedure or attempt to forbid it will be the subject of Child Protective Services (Family Independence Agency in Michigan) petitions with the court to remove the infant from them on the grounds that a) they fail to offer the child necessary safety and security by denying them by reason of fanatical, "conspiratorial", paranoid,
delusional, apocalyptic beliefs, this basic protection.
THey've been doing this to balking pet owners for some time now. What made us think we wouldn't be next. Even as they label people who fear the microchip implantation dangerous, they are carrying out the operations. Our people should expect to be marginalized and know how to combat it. In case you
don't get it, here is a copy below:
LAW
AUGUST 9, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 6
Cradles of Contention
The celebrated switched girls have got on swimmingly, so why are their
elders at war?
BY ANN BLACKMAN/CHARLOTTESVILLE
Rebecca Chittum and Callie Conley will always be known as the switched-at-birth kids. But do they know it themselves? Depends on who's doing the raising. Becca, as her family calls her, has no inkling of the infamous switch. "She doesn't understand. It's too early to tell her," says Tommy Rogers, her "grandfather," that is, the father of Whitney Rogers, the
woman who brought Becca home from the University of Virginia Medical Center in July 1995.
Meanwhile, the woman who took Callie home from the same hospital prides herself on telling her "daughter" the truth. Calling the four-year-old to the phone last week during an interview, Paula Johnson said, "Can you tell me whose belly you were born in?" Callie's reply: "In
Mommy Whitney's." Johnson continues, "And how did you come home with me?" Callie answers, "In the car."
Callie's biological parents, Whitney Rogers and Kevin Chittum, were killed in a traffic accident on July 4, 1998, just days before they would have learned of the switch.
And in mourning the young parents, there had been some hope that Callie and Becca's accidentally conjoined clans could let the girls share their lives together. A month after the deaths, the Chittums and the Rogerses, who share the care of Rebecca, and Johnson met and seemed to get along. The girls went swimming together in a family pool. Then Callie spent a week visiting Becca's extended family. "It went great," Tommy Rogers says. Both sides decreed that the girls would continue to live with all the families raising them.
Within months the truce was over.
Each side filed court papers seeking custody of both girls.
Johnson turned down a $2 million settlement offer from the state, saying it was not enough, and is suing the state-owned University of Virginia Medical Center for $31 million. She is also attempting to block a settlement for Rebecca reached by the Chittums, Rogerses and the state for the same reason. The case is on appeal before the Supreme Court of Virginia. Johnson's attorney, John Blakely, did not return phone calls last week seeking comment. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend, Carlton Conley, is suing the state and hospital officials for $4 million. He triggered the discovery of the switched babies when he balked at more child support for Callie. To certify his paternity, he had his blood tested. The results: not only wasn't he Callie's father, but Paula Johnson was not her mother.
Johnson also has a lawsuit against the makers of the identification bracelets used to keep track of patients. She charges that the babies' bracelets were so loose that they slipped off their wrists and ankles. (This month the medical center will begin to implant electronic bellybutton chips on newborns. Alarms will sound if a baby is taken through restricted doors.)
Finally, two of Callie's biological aunts, who helped care for the child last summer, have filed for visitation rights.
The families have stopped talking. "Me, myself, my days of speaking to Paula are over," Tommy Rogers tells TIME. "Paula wants everything--all the money, both kids. I reckon you get greedy sometimes." Johnson has a different view.
"Things just deteriorated over time, and it's got worse," she tells TIME. "No, it doesn't have nothing to do with money, not on my part anyway." Why does she think she is entitled to custody of Rebecca as well as Callie?
"Being a mother, maybe my maternal instincts kicked in," Johnson says. "She's my daughter. I gave birth to her. I carried her for nine months. I want her, and that's that."
The two girls appear to be oblivious to the wrangling. Tommy Rogers says Becca is a backyard daredevil on her blue-and-orange Big Wheel cycle, a sparkling child with a taste for pepperoni pizza, who is "growing like a little weed." Callie, meanwhile, looks forward to starting preschool this fall. And Paula Johnson is already making the child a regular on the local beauty-pageant circuit. Callie was recently a contestant in a Richmond pageant, winning the titles Miss Photogenic and Miss Personality. Says Johnson: "Callie's doin' real good."
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/microchips_in_babies.htm
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