Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: December 22, 2006 10:47:09 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: A Generation Is All They Need!!]
Subject: [Fw: A Generation Is All They Need!!]
A Generation Is All They Need
One day we will all happily be implanted with microchips, and our
every move will be monitored. The technology exists; the only
barrier is society's resistance to the loss of privacy
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 behavioral
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 marshaled 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.
What might Hitler, Mao, or Milosevic have accomplished if their
citizens were chipped, coded, and remotely monitored?
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 neighbors 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.
[The above article first appeared in the Star Sunday, December 10,
2006.]
"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one
thought over another."~ William James, American philosopher and
psychiatrist
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