Tracking Employees with Microchips :-(

I helped with some legal research a while ago for the ACLU’s technology division to see what privacy protections exist to safegaurd personal information in driver’s licenses and state ID cards as states move to a “common machine readable technology” by using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, magnetic strips and optical scan/3D bar codes.  I had also read an article in one of the information technology magazines about a couple inserting microchips into their hands and programming all their personal information and the access code to their residence in it and that made interesting reading.

It is one thing to electronically tag animals in farms or other livestock, but to put electronic identifiers in employees to do their jobs is crossing the line and this is what happened to employees at CityWatcher.com.

Slowly but surely America is leading the way in surveillance technology and instead of being a free society which was the vision of the founders of this nation, it is fast becoming a high tech policed country where every move of every person can be tracked down with these tracking technologies embedded in almost everything like our credit cards, passports, drivers licenses, library books and almost in all the consumables we buy in a store and the sad thing is that soon it will be in everything and we won’t be able to do anything about it.

It will be like one of those science fiction stories where citizens in a state will not have a say on anything and a small group of people will control everyone’s behavior and even their thinking and these small group will themselves be programmed to believe that it is in the best interest of mankind.

On the flipside imagine a positive situation many many years down the road, if every person in the world is tagged then maybe we will also be able to know everything about everyone and it will be one big world with no secrets or classified information and free flow of information. But I don’t think so and I won’t even get into the health issues and other problems that may arise down the road.