Two implanted with silicon chips
Use believed to be first on living humans in the U.S.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Tiny silicon chips were embedded into two workers who volunteered to help test the tagging technology at a surveillance equipment company, an official said Monday.

The so-called RFIDs — for radio frequency identification chips — are similar to ones Mexico's attorney general had implanted in some employees in 2004 to allow them to enter restricted areas.

Implanting them in workers at CityWatcher.com is believed to be the first use of the technology in living humans in the U.S. Sean Darks, chief executive of the company, has one of chips used to access secure vaults.

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Am I the only American, that is, out of Americans who don't wear tin foil hats, who is troubled by this? I'm not worried by the classic implant-as-control-device concept as much as I am about the potential for the government, insurance companies, schools, and employers to require people in their thrall to use such devices to keep track of their comings and goings. Generally, informed people worry about the potential misuse of national identification cards, which is what's going on in Britain right now. But national ID cards are nothing compared to what might happen with these tracking implants. Imagine insurance companies cancelling coverage because you drive through the wrong side of town too often for their tastes, or schools busting kids for being too close to a fight, or the government creating a list of people who go to anti-war rallies, or employers insisting that their workers be home by ten o'clock every evening so they can be more productive on the job. Think it'll never happen? In my lifetime I've watched the whole drug testing phenomenon take on a weird veneer of respectablility. Now days it seems like anybody with a halfway decent sounding excuse can demand your urine for proof of your purity whether you do drugs or not: believe what you want, that's a major violation of privacy, and everybody's okay with it. A proliferation of tracking implants would follow roughly the same course. Advocates would advance some kind of bogus argument, and a portion of the population and government would buy it. Somehow, it'll pass Constitutional muster, and, presto, we're all wearing implants if we want to participate in society.

Christ, we really are headed toward fascism.

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