They knew where u were last summer

[Guest pacguy]

from wired

(http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50187,00.html)

"Meet the Jacobs family: Jeffrey, Leslie and their son, Derek. They're a fairly typical American family, middle class and ambitious. The father is a dentist, the mother is an account executive at an interior design magazine and the 14-year-old son plays jazz and tinkers with computers in his spare time.

 

But one thing may soon make the Jacobses stand out: They could become the first family in the world to be implanted with microchips that contain their personal information.

 

The chip in question, the VeriChip, is similar to the biochips that have been used to identify pets and livestock for years.

 

Made by Applied Digital Solutions (ADS), the VeriChip stores six lines of text and is slightly larger than a grain of rice. It emits a 125-kHz radio frequency signal that can be picked up by a special scanner up to four feet away.

 

The company initially plans to market the chip in the United States as a medical device that would allow hospital workers to simply scan a patient's body in an emergency situation to access their health record.

 

The Jacobses, who live in Boca Raton, Florida, first heard about the microchip in a television news report.

 

"Derek stood up and said, 'I want to be the first kid to be implanted with the chip,'" Leslie Jacobs said. "For the next few days all he did was talk about the VeriChip."

 

Derek, an eighth-grader who became a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer at age 12, fantasizes about merging humans and machines. Jeffrey Jacobs, who is severely disabled, was interested in the device for health reasons. So Leslie called up Palm Beach-based ADS and offered her family as guinea pigs once the microchip is approved for testing by the FDA.

 

ADS chief technology officer Keith Bolton said he was a bit wary about the family's motives at first, but the Jacobses quickly convinced him they'd be perfect subjects. Since the VeriChip was announced in December, the company has been bombarded with queries from people interested in the device, Bolton said.

 

"Right now we have over 2,000 kids who have e-mailed, wanting to have the chip implanted," he said. "They think it's cool."

 

Derek, for one, dreams of a day when he'll be able log onto his computers or unlock his house and turn on the lights without lifting a finger, functions that British professor Kevin Warwick was able to do in a 1998 experiment with an implanted microchip.

 

Derek was also inspired by Richard Seelig, the company's director of medical applications, who injected two VeriChips into himself after hearing stories of rescue workers at the World Trade Center scrawling their names and Social Security numbers onto their bodies in case they didn't make it out of the rubble alive.

 

"I think it's one more step in the evolution of man and technology," said Derek, who once needed to move into the family room after his electronics equipment crowded his bedroom. "There are endless possibilities for this."

 

(Currently the chip is immutable once the device is injected via a syringe, using local anesthetic. In future applications, the chip may include a GPS receiver and other advanced features, company officials said.)

 

Jeffrey, a 48-year-old cancer survivor, has more practical reasons for wanting the VeriChip.

 

"If something happens to me and there's no one that knows anything about my medical history, any paramedic or hospital worker, if they have the scanner -- which hopefully everyone will have at some point –- will be able to scan all my information," he said. "It could save my life."

 

Leslie, 46, said she was motivated by security concerns. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks hit close to home: Her family lives in South Florida, where authorities say 14 of the 19 hijackers lived. Her office is a block away from tabloid publisher American Media, where a photo editor died after contracting anthrax.

 

The world would be a safer place if authorities had a tamper-proof way of identifying people, she said "

 

nice way of cataloguing people, makes me wonder when instant punishment will be invented.

[Guest MarvinisaLunatic]

That. Scares. Me. Keep. It. Away.

[Guest DrTom]

That scares me, too, big time.  The potential for abuse is obvious.  While I'm sure this device was made to only be used with the best of intentions, I'm sure we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

 

Just keep the scanners for these things away from people like John Ashcroft.

[Guest pacguy]

One of the more scarier things is the reference to live stock/pets.

Not only that but what type of kid wants one immediately?

[Guest mykatissatan]

Yea the kid wanted one sooooo bad.  Sure thing.

[Guest MarvinisaLunatic]

I can understand pets and livestock.  Livestock especially since they are worth so much and you wouldnt want people stealing them. I can hear parents groups going nuts over this because it will make it easier to keep kids safe...but, if a kidnapper wants to kidnap a kid bad enough and he knows that the kid has an implant, guess what, the kid is going to have some surgery done and it wont be by a doctor.

[Guest cdstunner66]

I knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out a way to lojack people.