You’re Not Sticking Me with One of Those Things

Posted on September 9, 2007 in Privacy

There’s a movement to implant RFID chips in Alzheimer’s patients. I’ve decided to include a line in my [[advance directive]] to the effect that I will not take part in any such program. This stems from my stand that I will not have one of the electronic rice grains put in my arm. I’d like to explain my reasons.

The argument for RFID technology up the arm is convenience. Instead of having paper ID and running the risk that you will go unidentified in the event of accident or death, doctors or coroners can just run a scanner over your body and get the information they need. Theoretically, I could put all the details of the drugs I need on the widget, a job that is now performed by the non-electronic pendant I wear around my neck. But the pendant does not announce itself where ever it goes as could be the case with the chip. Pass me through an elecronic field and my little bit of information technology would shout out who I am. I would lose the privacy that I enjoy now.

My wife’s uncle, the [[futurist]] Burnham Beckwith, would have loved RFID. TThe chips were good, he would have said, because they made crime impossible. I would retort that they would make a very different kind of crime and corruption facile. Currently many of us (including myself) have joined supermarket “clubs” which, whenever we choose to run our card through the checkout, tells the Great Computer in the Store what we have bought. With an implantation, the store could set up sensors that would tell us — without our having made any kind of choice at all — where we happened to wander while visiting. “Mr. Sax stopped in front of the pickled onions. We’ll assume that he was considering buying them.” Or “Mr. Sax came in and left without buying anything. Shoplifter?”

Imagine what could happen if, while shopping in a gardening store, you paused to tie your shoes in front of the nitrate fertilizers and then went to a gas station.

It gets worse when you consider how law enforcement might use the chips. They could make you be in places that you weren’t. Enemies of the state could be tagged as having been near terrorist attacks. When given such “hard evidence” against the testimony of others who could vouch for your being elsewhere, it is likely that more than a few jurors would vote for conviction. Being an enemy of the state does not necessitate violence: it could mean that you speak out against governmental policies such as oppression or wars in distant countries where we have no business being.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court says, the Constitution guarantees us the right to privacy insofar as this: we may not be searched without probable cause or a warrant. [[RFID]] technology amounts to an infringement by making our whereabouts known at all times and make our absence from a web of sensors cause for suspicion.

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The next phase in an RFID takeover of the country would be requiring prisoners and people on probation to have them. Oh, we say, that will help us take the bite out of crime. But from here, the proponents (who are in it for the money) will invade our minds with fears about those who “should be under surveillance”. That could be you, for reasons devised by a corrupt government of the Left, the Center, or the wRong.