Implanting microchips in humans

Tittle: implanting micrchips in humans
Source: www.buenosairesherald.com
Date of Publication: Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Author: Todd Lewan.

Vocabulary:
- Vault: noun, a room , especially in a bank used for keeping valuable things safe.
- Wondrous: adjective, strange, beautiful and impressive.
- Herd: noun, a group animals of the same type that live and feed together.
- Windshield (AmE): Windscreen (BrE), noun, the window across the front of a motorvehicle.
- Toll: noun, money that you pay to use a particular road or bridge.
- Tire (AmE): Tyre (BrE), noun, a thick rubber ring that fits around the egde of a wheel.
- Excoriate: (formal),verb, to criticize somebody or something.
- Detractor: noun, a person who tries to make somebody, something seen less good or valuable by criticizing it.
- Mistrust: noun, a feeling that you cannot trust somebody or something. suspicious.
- Savvy: (informal), adjective, having a practical knowledge and understanding of something, having a common sense: tech-savvy.
- Rig: verb, to fit equipment somewhere.
- Reader: noun, an electronic device that reads data stored in one form and changes it into another form so that a computer can perform operations on it.
- Surreptitious: adjective, done secretly or quickly.
- Livingwill: noun, a document stating your wishes concerning medical treatment in the case that you become so ill that you can no longer make decisions about it, in particular asking doctors to stop treating you and let you die.

Main Ideas:
- Two employees of City Watcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, had glass-encapsulated microchips embedded in their forearms.
- The chipping of the two workers was a way of resctricting access to vaults that held sesitive data, images for police departments, security key cards, and clearance codes.
- For the chief executive of the company this is a sophisticated technique to protect high-end secure data.
- The news fired up a debate over the proliferaton of technologies that erode privacy in digital age.
- To some people, the microchip was a wondrous invention, to others the notion of tagging people was Orwellian.
- To these critics, chipping might start with Alzheiemer's patients but would eventually be suggested for convicts, sex offenders, illegal aliens, etc. until one day a majority of Americans would find themselves electronically tagged.
- 30 years ago the first electronic tags were fixed to cattle to track herds' reproductive and eating habits.
- In the 1990s, millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, pets and even racehorses.
- Microchips are now fixed to car screenshields as a toll-paying device and embedded in tires, library books and passports.
- The city Watcher.com executive said his employees volunteered to be chipped.
- Civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchip's implantation in people.
- Some critics saw the implants as a fullmiment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age in which humans are forced to take "the mark of the beast" with them.
- Others saw it as a step towards a Big Brother society.
- In desing the tag are simple and implantation are quick procedures, but microchips cannot be easily and painlessly removed.
- A physician got chipped so that if he had an accident doctors could identify him and access to his medical history quickly.
- This is seen by people as a loss of anonymity.
- Microchip proponents and detractors agree that Americans' mistrust of microchip and technology runs deep.
- Among many cons of microchips, spoofing is one of them: thieves pluck people's ID out of their arms with their own readers.
- Verichip.com (Florida), the company that makes implantable microchips, concedes that it is a problem.
- Scott Silverman, the chief executive of that company, says that to grab information from radio frecuency products with a scanning device is not hard to do.
- Verichip has sold 7,000 microchips worlwide of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans.
- The company is present tagging of diabetics patients, people with heart conditions or Alzheimer.
- In an emergency, hospital staff could wave a reader over the patient's arm get an ID number and via Internet, enter a data base and pull up the person's identity and medical history.
- Some wonder why they should abandon non-invasive tags such as medic bracelets.
- Silverman responds that an implanted chip is guaranteed to be always with you.
- The company charges $20 a year for customers to keep on its database a record of blood type, allergies, medications, driver license data and living will directives, and $80 to keep an individual's full medical history.

Personal Reaction:
In my opinion, tagging people with microchips can be harmful depending on the use of them. If laws allow to "mark" delincuents as a way to control them in their re-insertation in society, I think that such policies could be quite a benefit, especially for the rest of the community. The same ocuurs with patients which are at a constant risk, because the quick acces of the hospital stuff to their medical history can save the patients'lives. As regarding employees, to embed them with microchips is a meassure that the companies should only be allowded to take with the approval of the workers that will have the chips on their arms.
The problem may arise when peoples'ID is in danger because they can be stolen with a scan which reads the microchips'information. To solve this, companies involved in the production of microchips for human should provide their customers with security meassures and contract which assure them that their identity will be safely kept on a data base. This type of contracts can relife people from those kind of fears.
To enter into an advanced technological age has it cons and pros and companies and governmets should work together to find the ways to keep the balance between what is right and what is wrong as regarding the use of technology. And to what refers to microchips they should find the way to assure society that such technology will be used for the improvement of peoples'life, in advanced, before such devices are released into the market.