American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [118]
In 2008 a three-judge appeals court, reversing a lower court’s finding, ruled that federal border agents don’t need any special reason to search laptops, cell phones, or digital cameras for evidence of crimes.65 Since Bush had already called for some high-tech measures to crack down on illegal immigration from Mexico, a company called VeriChip came up with a way to “chip the foreigners.” It’s a Radio Frequency Identification Tag, RFID for short, encapsulated in glass and injected hypodermically into your skin. The ID number can be read right through your clothes, by radio waves, from close range. Tommy Thompson, who headed up Health and Human Services under Bush, joined VeriChip’s board after he left the administration and soon was out there extolling the merits of getting chipped as a means for Americans to link up to their medical records. The Pentagon has been entertaining talk of the RFIDs taking the place of the old military “dog tags.” It’s also being marketed as a possible future way to make payments by combining the chip with your credit card.66
Microchips are already everywhere. They’re putting chips in our credit cards, our cars, department store clothing tags, library books, literally everything but us—and I figure we’re not far behind. I disconnected the North-Star on my vehicle as soon I bought it. I’d rather have to break my window to get my keys, rather than have them know my location every time I drive anywhere. The RFID technology enabling both objects and people to be wirelessly tagged and tracked is on the edge of being a billion-dollar industry. Back in 2003, the Defense Department and Wal-Mart teamed up to move RFID along by mandating their suppliers to put these radio tags on all their crates and cartons. Unlike barcodes, RFID chips don’t fall under federal regulations—and they can be read, without knowledge of the holder, through just about anything except metal and water.
Big corporations are excited about using miniaturized computers along with radio antennaes to electronically “sniff” you. In 2005, American Express applied for a patent describing how RFID-embedded objects that shoppers carry could send out “identification signals” picked up by electronic “consumer trackers.” In return, the shoppers could be sent video ads offering them “incentives” to buy the products they’d seemed interested in. In 2006, IBM received patent approval for an invention it dubbed “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items.” Yet another patent (NCR Corporation) described using camouflaged sensors and video cameras to film your facial expression at counter displays, “which allows one to draw valuable inferences about the behavior of large numbers of shoppers.” Proctor & Gamble went so far as to seek a patent to check out what you’re examining on a lower shelf of the store.
“With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments,” says Mark Rasch, who used to head the computer-crime unit at the Justice Department. By putting sniffers in the right places, companies can invisibly “rifle through people’s pockets, purses, suitcases, briefcases, luggage . . . and possibly their kitchens and bedrooms . . . anytime of the day or night.”67
Under our Constitution and Bill of Rights, government is not allowed to do certain things. Corporate America doesn’t fall under those same rules. So the government is getting the private sector to do the dirty work, violations that they can’t be held accountable for. Then the corporations simply take the information they’ve acquired and turn it over to the government. You might say, what else could they learn? Well, things like this: say you’ve got health care coming up. If they know everything you buy in the store, they might say, “Here’s a candidate for diabetes, look how he eats, let’s pass this along because you could be a risk.”
I know I was surveilled