Donald Noble's Website

A story at boingbong caught my attention recently. The USA’s Department of Homeland Security are testing using radio-tags to track foreign visitors. Full story at The Kingston Whig-Standard.

This is very scary. It may be a “trial”, but a fuller implementation of this could lead to the Dept. of Homeland Security tracking all legal visitors to their country (excluding Canadians apparently). This might be immensely useful to the authorities, but it must be seen as a severe infringement of your civil liberties. It also does nothing about the large number of illegal immigrants, although maybe that reasoning will be used to persuade everyone that they need to carry this type of card in order not to be locked up for being in the USA illegally.

If this is the future, I don’t like it. While innocent people may have nothing to fear in an ideal world, technology is not infallible and errors do occur. However, it is often assumed to be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. That is where the problems occur. How can you argue against the computerised tracking system, it said you were in that location, and therefore you were!

Unfortunately, if this trend continues, I won’t get to see a huge chunk of the North American Continent. Which is a pity, as I am sure it would be an interesting place to visit.

More details on the Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology can be found at Wikipedia, and every conspiracy site on the internet!

This entry was posted on Sunday 31st July 2005 in Blog and tagged technology, transport, USofA, world_politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.