The future has arrived – at least in Wisconsin, where a technology company will now offer its employees the opportunity to get microchipped for easier access to the building and to purchase food from the cafeteria. The rice-sized microchip uses Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) and is implanted between the thumb and forefinger. Although the company claims the chips cannot be used as a GPS system to locate employees, it still poses a host of frightening consequences.
RFID technology uses electromagnetic fields to identify electronically stored information. It uses near-field communications (NFC) – the same kind of technology you find in mobile payments and contactless credit cards. The Wisconsin tech company, Three Square Market (32M), has more than fifty employees already signed up to get this new device:
“We foresee the use of RFID technology to drive everything from making purchases in our office break room market, opening doors, use of copy machines, logging into our office computers, unlocking phones, sharing business cards, storing medical/health information, and used as payment at other RFID terminals,” said Todd Westby, 32M CEO. “Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.”
Let’s take a step back and consider this. People are volunteering to have a microchip inserted into their bodies – the same type of technology used to track lost pets. Even though 32M said the chips would not be used with tracking systems such as a GPS, where does that information go? Who – or what – owns the chip and its information? If you get fired, laid off, or quit, is the chip forcibly removed or is it yours to keep? Will you have to pay an extraordinary fee to have it removed? What are the health risks involved?
Society has become obsessed with finding the quickest and easiest way to accomplish everyday life activities. For the ease of swiping a microchipped hand across a scanner to pay for a candy bar at lunch time, people are willing to subject themselves to being tracked and traced by only God knows who. How long will the government sit idly by without stealthily dipping its hands into this tasty cookie jar?
32M said the device could be used to store medical information. Is this something you would want anyone with the right reader to be able to get? Imagine what government agencies could do with that information!
USA Today posted a video promoting the RFID, but noted that Christians were concerned because of a Bible prophecy that warned of the end of days when “man cannot buy or sell without the mark of the beast on their right hand.”
In February, a Senate committee met in Nevada to discuss a piece of legislation that would prevent forced implantation of tracking devices on humans. The author of the bill, Sen. Becky Harris (R-LV), said there were too many risks associated with the chips:
There’s no cryptology or protection measures that we’re aware of that are placed on these chips, so it’s possible to hack the information contained within the chips. It is possible that you could harass or stalk chipped individuals with the right type of reader.
Harris warned that these chips seemed to have caused fibrosarcoma and sarcoma – malignant cancerous tumors – in animal testing. Yet people are still willing to have the technology inserted into their flesh. Sen. Tick Segerblom (D-LV) may have had it right when he said, “Sounds like a Russian plot to me.”
People are giving up their right to freedom and privacy. Out of laziness, they cede their liberties. With an oblivious smile, these folks gleefully hold out their hands and let compromise their bodies with technology. The fifty or so 32M employees will be chipped at the 32M inaugural “chip party” hosted at their headquarters in River Falls, WI on August 1, 2017.
