666 IS COMING: ONE GENERATION IS ALL 'THEY' NEED Added: Dec 10th, 2006 11:11 AM
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
KEVIN HAGGERTY SPECIAL TO THE STAR
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.
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