Chip set to act as a digital ID

Jun 16, 2003

The painless procedure barely lasted 15 minutes. In his South Florida office, Dr. Harvey Kleiner applied a local anaesthetic above the triceps of my right arm, then he inserted a thick needle deep under the skin: “First we locate a prime spot,’’ he said

The painless procedure barely lasted 15 minutes. In his South Florida office, Dr. Harvey Kleiner applied a local anaesthetic above the triceps of my right arm, then he inserted a thick needle deep under the skin: “First we locate a prime spot,’’ he said. “The next thing is to release the button that triggers the injection mechanism, and that’s it, the cargo’s been delivered.”

The ‘cargo’ was a half-inch-long microchip inside a glass and silicone cylinder that carries my permanent identification number. The tiny chip inside me can transmit personal information to anyone with a special hand-held scanner.

Theoretically, this VeriChip will allow doctors to call up my medical records even if I’m too badly hurt to answer questions. It is also supposed to allow me to get money from an ATM by flashing my arm instead of punching in my PIN number; or reassure airport security that I am a journalist, not a terrorist.

And, though the VeriChip strikes critics as Orwellian, its makers think the surgically implanted IDs could be the Social Security numbers of the future in a nervous world.

“I believe the day will come when most of us will have something similar to the VeriChip under our skin,’’ said Scott Silverman, president of Florida-based Applied Digital Solutions. “People will regard that its benefits — in terms of financial, security, and health care — far outweigh the possibility of loss of privacy.”

I am only the 18th person in the world — and the first journalist — to get “chipped.” Most of the others are ADS employees along with one Florida family. The idea of a system that gives emergency workers and others immediate access to potentially life-saving information is exactly what drew the Jacobs family of Boca Raton to the VeriChip. At the request of their 14-year-old son, Derek, the Jacobses got chipped last year.

“My husband has cancer and we’ve experienced the frustrating delays of trying to provide urgent medical history information every time he is rushed into the emergency room,” says Leslie Jacobs.

Since the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, she continues, “We know that our lives are increasingly vulnerable. If we want increased safety, security, and peace of mind, we need to take positive steps. We’ve decided that having a VeriChip is one way to do just that.”

But critics see surveillance technology like the VeriChip as a growing threat, giving potentially dangerous new power to businesses and government alike. In a report issued in January by the American Civil Liberties Union, Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt warned that an explosion of technology has already created a “surveillance monster.’’

“Scarcely a month goes by in which we don’t read about some new high-tech way to invade people’s privacy, from face recognition to implantable microchips, data mining, DNA chips, and even ‘brain wave fingerprinting’,” they wrote. “The fact is there are no longer any technical barriers to the Big Brother regime portrayed by George Orwell in his novel 1984.”

The VeriChip is similar to the chips already embedded in animals all over the world acting as ‘pet passports,’ allowing customs officials to monitor those animals that do not need to go into quarantine, or to identify your stray dog.

My chip is mainly for demonstration purposes, carrying only an identification number and the capacity for about three paragraphs of information. Only 10 hospitals and doctors in Florida have the scanner to read the chips. And the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the chips for use in health care, so they cannot be used to access medical records.

However, ADS officials say this is just the beginning. They want to build a chip that can store loads of information, or act as the key to a central database that stores information about the user. ADS hopes to be able to track the movement of people with chips worldwide using global positioning satellites.

The company is field testing its Personal Locator Device (PLD), which ADS says could help track lost children, sick elderly family members, lost mountain climbers, or kidnap victims. Company officials say they have been inundated with requests from private companies in Latin America, especially Mexico and Colombia.

The PLD is still years away from wide use, according to Keith Bolton, ADS’s chief of technologies. The prototype is rather large – 2.5 inches in diameter – and would require major surgery for implantation. It is powered by a pacemaker battery, and it would let anyone with access to the PLD system track the wearer anytime, anywhere in the world, at the click of a mouse.

The Globe

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