(AP) 2 Workers Have Chips Embedded Into
Them
CINCINNATI
Tiny silicon chips were embedded into two workers who volunteered to help test
the tagging technology at a surveillance equipment company, an official said
Monday.
The Mexico attorney general's office implanted the so-called RFIDs -- for radio
frequency identification chips -- in some employees in 2004 to restrict access
to secure areas.
Implanting them in the workers at CityWatcher.com is believed to be the first use of the technology in living humans in the United States.
Sean Darks, chief executive of the company, also had one of the chips embedded.
"I have one," he said. "I'm not going to ask somebody to do something I wouldn't
do myself. None of my employees are forced to get the chip to keep their job."
The chips are the size of a grain of rice and a doctor embedded them in the
forearm just under the surface of the skin, Darks said.
They work "like an access card. There's a reader outside the door; you walk up
to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door," Darks said.
Darks said the implants don't enable CityWatcher.com to track employees'
movements.
"It's a passive chip. It emits no signal whatsoever," Darks said. "It's the same
thing as a keycard."
CityWatcher.com has contracts with six cities to provide cameras and Internet
monitoring of high-crime areas, Darks said. The company is experimenting with
the chips to identify workers with access to vaults where data and images are
kept for police departments, he said.
The technology predates World War II, but has appeared in numerous modern
adaptations, such as tracking pets, vehicles and commercial goods at warehouses.
After Hurricane Katrina, as body counts mounted and missing-person reports
multiplied, some morgue workers in Mississippi used the tiny computer