RFID & The Future

Most of us are aware of the RFID tags and chips…now there are
DragonFlys…

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”
Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.
“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ ”

and MagicMirrors…

What it does is let you try on virtual outfits and share with friends, allowing them to then text you back with a yay or nay. Besides the main panel where you can see your proposed new look, there are two other panels: the left showing you available pieces from the store, while the right offers up info on accessories that you might like.

Radio-frequency identification, it IS useful, I suppose.  For Alzheimer’s patients and others with certain medical conditions, for lost dogs & cats, merchandise location, toll roads, and many passports.

The Future of RFID….

Though I am not really a conspiracy theorist, there are certainly some windows of possibility to use this technology against average citizenry. 
As it is right now, DHS (.pdf) says;

RFID appears to offer little benefit when compared to the consequences it brings for privacy and data integrity. Instead, it increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security. Most difficult and troubling is the situation in which RFID is ostensibly used for tracking objects (medicine containers, for example), but can be in fact used for monitoring human behavior. These types of uses are still being explored and remain difficult to predict.

For these reasons, we recommend that RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings. When DHS does choose to use RFID to identify and track individuals, we recommend the implementation of the specific security and privacy safeguards described herein.

Yet it has been mentioned for use in tagging our military, for quick identification purposes.  Verichip has been lobbying the Pentagon for the authority to implant RFID tags in virtually all military personnel, according to a series of articles in The Examiner a Washington, D.C., newspaper.

VeriChip wants to insert the chips under the skin of the right arms of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen. The idea is to be able to scan an arm and obtain that person’s identity and medical history.

What do Conspiracy theorists say?  Listen…

That was Aaron Russo, who passed away a few months ago after a six year battle with cancer.  Was he a conspiracy theorist?  Personally, I don’t know, maybe some of you have some light to shed on that, I’ll remain open-minded.

Of course the Religious right has Hal Lindsey commenting on the subject also…

OKAY…..I find myself somewhere in the middle of those opinions.  I feel we must move forward technologically as a society, there will be innovations that will at first feel uncomfortable….progress, change, motion in inevitable.  But I am not willing to EVER insert something of this sort into my body…You would have to seriously sedate me and tie my down to get a chip into me.  Even then, I’d be screaming my lungs out!  But technology is pushing the chip to even smaller limits with plenty of storage capabilities and farther ranging transmissions.  What if one day all they had to do was pass by you in a bar and tap you on your shoulder…and not even know you had just been “tagged”!
Gives a whole new meaning to “Tag, you’re it!”