U.S. military developing spychips for soldiers

*Source: WND

The U.S. military wants to plant nanosensors in soldiers to monitor health on future battlefields and immediately respond to needs, but a privacy expert warns the step is just one more down the road to computer chips for all.

“It’s never going to happen that the government at gunpoint says, ‘You’re going to have a tracking chip,’” said Katherine Albrecht, who with Liz McIntyre authored “Spychips,” a book that warns of the threat to privacy posed by Radio Frequency Identification.

“It’s always in incremental steps. If you can put a microchip in someone that doesn’t track them … everybody looks and says, ‘Come on,’” she said. “It’ll be interesting seeing where we go.”

According to a report at Mobiledia, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has confirmed plans to create nanosensors to monitor the health of soldiers on battlefields.

The devices also would report data to doctors. But privacy analysts have expressed concern that the implants could be used not just to monitor health but to keep track of and possibly control people.

DARPA describes the technology on which it is working as “a truly disruptive innovation,” which would diagnose, monitor vital states and “even deliver medicine into the bloodstream.”

According to LiveScience.com, “Solving the problem of sickness could have a huge impact on the number of soldiers ready to fight, because far more have historically died due to illness rather than combat.”

The report suggested that for special forces, “the practical realization of implantable nanosensors capable of monitoring multiple indicators of physiological state could be a truly disruptive innovation.”

Already being researched is the concept of nanosensors diagnosing disease.

DARPA expects to launch a second effort focused on treatment later this year.

Albrecht said the move is another step in the trip down the road of having every person implanted with a chip that might very well monitor health but also other areas of life.

Microchipping, she said, already is “par for the course” for pets in many parts of the nation, and that acceptance will make it easier to require it for people.

She said it was expected that captive audiences, such as prisoners and troops, would be the first subjected to the requirement, which would make it easier for the general populace to accept it as well.

“It’s interesting,” she said. “I’m stunned how this younger generation is OK. They don’t see the problem. … ‘Why wouldn’t everyone want to be tracked?’”

But she said Americans will have to decide to say no to incremental advances, or by the time officials finally roll out the idea of chips for all, whether they want them or not, it will be too late to decide.

“The analogy that I draw is [that of a train], and if I’m in California and I do not want to wind up in New City, every stop brings me closer,” she said. “At some point I have to get off the train.”

Albrecht also has helped develop and launch a new project called StartPage, which now is handling some 2 million search requests per day.

The benefit of the page is its privacy. The site explains that every time a person uses a typical search program such as Google, “your search data is recorded.”

“Then they store that information in a giant database,” she explains.

As a result, corporate America and the government have access to “a shocking amount of personal information about you, such as your interests, family circumstances, political leanings, medical conditions and more

Read the whole story: Get “Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government plan to Track your every Move”

WND reported previously that owners of pets have reported cancer in their animals after microchipping. The report documented how a dog developed a highly aggressive cancer right at the point where a chip was embedded.

Albrecht told the story of another dog, a 5-year-old Yorkshire terrier named Scotty that was diagnosed with cancer in Memphis, Tenn. Scotty developed a tumor between his shoulder blades, in the same location where the microchip had been implanted. The tumor the size of a small balloon – described as malignant lymphoma – was removed. Scotty’s microchip was embedded inside the tumor.

Verichip, a major manufacturer of the microchip implants, touts the technology’s capability to identify a lost pet and enable its return home, while dismissing potential health risks.

“Over the last 15 years,” stated the VeriChip website, “millions of dogs and cats have safely received an implantable microchip with limited or no reports of adverse health reactions from this life-saving product, which was recently endorsed by the USDA. These chips are a well-accepted and well-respected means of global identification for pets in the veterinary community.”

WND also reported there were warnings about a radio chip plan that would allow identification of individuals by government agents simply by walking through an assembly.

The proposal, which was supported by Janet Napolitano, the chief of the Department of Homeland Security, would embed radio chips in driver’s licenses, or “enhanced driver’s licenses.”

“Enhanced driver’s licenses give confidence that the person holding the card is the person who is supposed to be holding the card, and it’s less elaborate than REAL ID,” Napolitano said in a Washington Times report.

REAL ID was a plan for a federal identification system standardized across the nation that so alarmed governors many states have adopted formal plans to oppose it. However, a privacy advocate today told WND that the EDLs are many times worse.

WND also previously has reported on such chips when hospitals used them to identify newborns, a company desired to embed immigrants with the electronic devices, a government health event showcased them and when Wal-Mart used microchips to track customers.

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Charlie Walton, inventor of RFID, passes away at 89.

*Source: VentureBeat



Charlie Walton, the inventor of an ubiquitous wireless technology known as RFID, has passed away at 89.

Walton, who lived in Los Gatos, died on Nov. 6, according to his wife Ann Walton. I once wrote an article about Walton while at the San Jose Mercury News and his efforts to proselytize RFID, known in long form as radio frequency identification.

These are the chips that go into the access control devices, so you can slap a badge across a reader to open the door to an office. They are also used in car locks and on shipping pallets so that companies can track expensive goods. Every time you use one of these chips, it would be nice if, once in a while, you thought about the man who invented them.

The passing of Steve Jobs recently gave Silicon Valley its first real experience with the mortality of the technology legends that we have all grown up with. But Walton’s passing reminds us that there are inventors who have toiled away in relative obscurity. Walton pioneered the technology as a lone inventor in the 1970s and 1980s, but it came into its own in the last decade as the cost of making the tiny chips came down to a matter of pennies. Walton made a few million dollars from the invention, enough to keep him inventing technology for the rest of his days.

“I feel good about it and gratified I could make a contribution,” Walton told me in 2004.

RFID is expected to generate $6 billion in worldwide revenue in 2011, according to ABI Research. The chips are used in access control, car immobilization, electronic toll collection, electronic document identification, dog tags, asset management, baggage handling, cargo tracking, contactless payments and ticketing, and supply chain management.

The chips transmit information about a product’s location and use over short-range radio waves to a computer, where the data can be cross-checked with a database. Libraries use RFID readers to track books, and hospitals use them to track drug bottles. In 2007, Walton wrote a book about the things around us that we cannot see entitled, “The Space Before Your Face.”

Back in the 1970s, bar codes were the main competition. At 25 cents each, they were hard to beat. Walton’s first RFID cards cost $1.75, and so bar codes beat out RFID for use in scanning grocery items at supermarket checkout scanners.

RFID had been around in different forms before Walton created a radio-operated door lock, but his design became popular. With his tags, a tiny electrical current from a radio transceiver, or RFID reader, wakes up a dormant card and gives it enough power via the wireless connection itself. That power gives the card enough power to generate a response. Walton’s first patent to mention RFID was filed in 1983, but the first patent that he got on the technology (No. 3752960) was granted in August 1973. That patent was later reference by dozens of later inventions.

The invention earned Walton some recognition. He appeared on the TV quiz show “What’s My Line? And his invention was mentioned in articles about electronic locks in Business Week and Popular Science in 1973.

Like many inventors of his era, Walton grew up as a ham radio enthusiast. He was raised in Maryland and New York and studied electrical engineering at Cornell University. He went to work at IBM’s research labs in 1960. there, he studied analog and digital computing. In 1970, he struck out on his own as an inventor with his own company, Proximity Devices, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

He showed his RFID technology to the board of General Motors, but they rejected it as “too Buck Rogers.” In his career, he collected more than 50 patents. He went for a year without a salary. Finally, he got lucky licensing it to lock maker Schlage, which used it to make electronic locks that can open by waving a key card near a reader (pictured in a San Jose Mercury News photo at top).

The first RFID card key was passive. It used no battery power itself and was awakened when it came within six inches of a reader. It was bulky at first, but then it was integrated into chips and miniaturized over time. In 1980, he also got a patent for a digital version of RFID, which could change data on the cards. The low-cost led to its widespread adoption in the past decade.

After about a decade, Walton said he began to make good money from the patent royalties. I visited his home on a two-acre lot in the hills of Los Gatos. I recall he had a toy train set on a big pool-table-size board with all of the accompanying scenery. Walton rigged it to a pulley that would raise the board and keep it out of sight when it wasn’t in use. It was clearly the creation of a natural tinkerer. As we walked the grounds, Walton pointed out that he invented a better gopher trap as well.

In some ways, Walton’s RFID patents were bittersweet. His last royalty-bearing patent expired in the mid-1990s. That meant that he wasn’t able to cash in on a giant windfall as big entities such as Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense began in the past decade to require supplies to put RFID tags on millions of warehouse goods. Patents, by law, run out after 17 years. The old bar code rivals are still around, but RFID is here to stay.

There will be a memorial service for Walton on Dec. 18 at 3 pm at the Los Gatos Unitarian Fellowship.