Karlin Lillington Inner invasion

Net Results:A new law, passed last week in California, prevents employers from requiring their employees to be tagged with microchips, writes Karlin Lillington.

At first glance the new law seems a bit on the wacky side - an unnecessary law to prevent something none of us is actually worried about. After all, we do not live in some science fiction dystopia where the state or the corporate world demand that we be tagged like cattle.

But once you get past the urge to make jovial remarks about how the whole scenario could be a Terminator plot twist that Terminator and governator Arnold Schwarzenegger himself signed into law, it becomes apparent that this may well be yet another instance in which California legislates on a very serious issue well before the rest of the US catches up.

Like a lot of technologies, RFID tags have uses which are only beginning to be explored. And, if they are like most technologies, their uses in the future will be very different from what we imagine right now. They are already appearing in passports and access cards and are well known to many of us with cats or dogs. There is a whole industry - including many of the tech giants such as Sap, Oracle, Intel and IBM - very excited about RFID's possibilities. Indeed, RFID has been heavily hyped for some time now without quite taking off . . . yet.

As it is, placing chips in humans is not all that sci-fi anyway. RFID tags have already been used in humans and, in one startling case, the now defunct Ohio security company CityWatcher.com requested that several of its employees have the tags inserted in their arms in 2006 in order to access some high-security areas of their building.

The US company Verichip, which alone has received US Food and Drug Administration approval for a chip for human use, says it has sold about 2,000 of these chips intended for people, many of which are used for patient identification and to carry medical information. Some have been used in Alzheimer's patients, who might be unable to identify themselves to others, for example.

But the ability to implant the chips in people and that first use of chips in CityWatcher.com's employees gave the jitters to some politicians. The first legislation against their forced use in humans was passed swiftly in 2006 by the state of Wisconsin. North Dakota passed similar legislation this April. Two more states have legislation in the pipeline, while two others have seen bills fail at the voting stage.

The state senator who sponsored the California bill, Joe Simitian of Palo Alto, told reporters that he first examined the issue after a California school in Sutter County required students to wear identification badges with RFID chips in order to monitor class attendance. Parents complained and the system was dropped, but Simitian says he could see what could possibly happen.

The bill was supported by an odd range of bedfellows: the American Civil Liberties Union; Gun Owners of California; Privacy Rights Clearinghouse; Citizens Against Government Waste; California State Parent Teacher Association; Republican Liberty Caucus; and the National Organisation for Women.

It was opposed by the RFID industry, unsurprisingly, which is well aware that the public is already edgy that such technology might be used to provide personal details they would prefer to be kept private. Plans to tag products at Wal-Mart, for example, already have received damaging press.

Simitian - who represents a constituency in the heart of Silicon Valley - has been careful to indicate that it is not the technology he opposes, but a specific use of it that would be invasive of personal privacy.

"RFID technology is not in and of itself the issue. RFID is a minor miracle, with all sorts of good uses," he has said in a statement. "But we shouldn't condone forced 'tagging' of humans. It's the ultimate invasion of privacy."

He has also clearly demonstrated how the technology can be misused even in cases where its purpose is to protect privacy and enhance security. A student aide in his office built his own RFID reader and managed to steal the identities of nine legislators in an afternoon spent roaming around the state capitol building with the device in his briefcase.

This issue has received far less publicity than the passing of the implantation bill, but it is arguably far more serious.

Both subjects are ripe for consideration here before we find ourselves adopting technologies which could be abused as well as used in positive ways. It pays to consider the future before it arrives in an unwanted form.

blog: www.techno-culture.com