Its right out of the X-files. Remember when Agent Scully realized that someone-problem aliens-had put an electronic chip under her skin at the back of her neck?
The TV show was using one of the most famous paranoid fantasies. Now the subcutaneous microchip has been made real under the brand name VeriChip by a Florida company called Applied Digital Solutions. Its first use was to track livestock, and it’s been used also for pet identification. Humans are next.
The Food and Drug Adminidtration last week approved the use of the injectable VeriChip and its associated system of scanners and database in medical facilities. It’s just for identification, mind you. The VeriChip sends a digital code so that doctors can confirm a patient’s identity and call up the patient’s medical information from the database, even if the patient is unconscious.
A certain subcategory of paranoids, self-described privacy advocates, have denounced the FDA approval because they fear it will lead us down the slippery slope to total surveillance. Anybody who objects to a national identity card is going to object in a big way to using a VeriChip in an identity system.
Even worse to the privacy advocates is what could come next: The VeriChip has room for a Global Positioning System receiver and a transmitter that could upload the user’s position to earth-orbiting satellites. Agent Mulder would know where she is.
Take a deep breath, America. Get ready to meet the future. In a few years, VeriChip or something like them should be as ubiquitous as the office identity cards dangling uselessly around so many American necks. It seems these things actually can secure areas that need to be secure from unauthorized entry. Combined with some biometric-tag technology –like a finger or retinal scan-actually can identify people in a reliable and convenient way. Honest and sensible people will welcome this kind of technology to avoid some of the clumsy and ineffectual attempts at security they encounter at airports, banks, schools and stores.
Benjamin Franklin said that we deserve neither liberty nor security if we give up some liberty in the quest of security. The alleged right to be anonymous, however, its not a form of liberty always worth preserving for everyone.
Anonymity is ruining the utility of e-mail, as anyone who has tierd to stop the flow of spam knows. We ought to trade anonymity for more liberty, security and convenience.
Some types of identify control need not even be a government function; the VeriChip or something like it may come in through credit-card verification or as part of a secure frequent-flyer program to bypass the ineffectual government screening at airports.
But the government does need it and should use it for some critical tasks: The Department of Homeland Security and its been predecessors have never tried to keep close track of foreign visitors and never chased after people who overstay their visas. They had the excuse that the job was impossible. This technology may end the excuses and make the immigration services more accountable.
Editorial page editor Thomas g. Dolan receives e-mail at
tg.dolan@barrons.com