Chipping people.

Last month the Associated Press reported that two employees of "CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, ... had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms" to protect secure data. Company chief executive Sean Darks explained: "There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door."

According to the AP account, this is the first time American workers had been injected with RFIDs--radio frequency identification tags--for the purpose of doing their jobs. Not surprisingly, this news has provoked controversy about the right to privacy and how the tracking and identification technology might be abused, even though the two workers had voluntarily agreed to be chipped.

RFID technology is used to keep track of packages, pets, and livestock. But tracking livestock is one thing and tracking people is something else entirely.

No doubt embedded RFIDs would be "voluntary" at the outset, somewhat like "voluntary drug tests" and "voluntary compliance" with tax laws. It could become more overtly involuntary over time--starting (say) with Alzheimer's patients and then expanding to other groups from convicts to parolees to illegal aliens.

Inexorably, once the camel's nose is under the tent, we could hear arguments for inserting the chip at birth--hey, no more hospital mix-ups! And the information contained would doubtlessly escalate: today, health information; tomorrow political affiliations, income, "anti-State activities." The Orwellian implications of this technology in the hands of a growing surveillance state are very real.