ABC reports about a plan to implant hospital patients with RFID chips:

“In a new test program, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey plans to implant patients suffering from chronic diseases with a microchip that will give emergency room staff access to their medical information and help avoid costly or serious medical errors, the insurer said on Friday…

…Horizon will test the program for two years to see if it warrants expansion.”

Several medical centers have started to “chip” humans:

“Trinitas becomes the sixth hospital that has agreed to adopt the VeriMed System in their emergency department in the last five months and the third hospital in the State of New Jersey to employ the VeriMed System.”

VeriChip’ family of companies has be involved in “chipping” 6 million dogs and cats. How long will it be until implanted chips become mandatory? It’s so convenient, and it is for your safety.

To see what it’s going to be like when you get chipped, check out this video of the chip insertion process.

Bruce Schneier writes about how mass surveillance is not an effective way to find terrorists:

"No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists…

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people…"

The Washington Post reports on an “Orwellian” plan to track college students:

“‘Is there some reason to reverse three decades of [privacy] policy and go down this Orwellian road?’ asked Christopher B. Nelson, the president of St. John’s College, during a conference call with reporters to call attention to a new survey on the subject.

The controversial concept of a national student ‘unit’ tracking system has been floating around for about two years. It was given a boost last month when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a draft report endorsing such a plan. . .

The United States Student Association views the proposal ‘as a massive invasion of student privacy,’ according to the group’s legislative director, Rebecca Thompson.

‘It’s cradle-to-grave tracking,’ said Rolf Wegenke, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. ‘It can easily be connected to other databases and be connected to basic freedoms.’”

News.com is runing a story about new legislation that would increase FBI snooping:

“The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned. . .

Require any manufacturer of “routing” and ‘addressing’ hardware to offer upgrades or other ‘modifications’ that are needed to support Internet wiretapping. . .

Authorize the expansion of wiretapping requirements to ‘commercial’ Internet services including instant messaging if the FCC deems it to be in the “public interest.” That would likely sweep in services such as in-game chats offered by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming system as well.”

You can read the full story here.

CNET is running a story about a new way of tracking things:

"Why attach an RFID chip to a shirt when you can identify the shirt through undetectable, invisible chemicals mixed into the fibers?…

[CrossID] has devised a way to put a chemical signature into fabrics, labels, inks, boxes and other materials. When a hand or door scanner tuned to a specific frequency is pointed at an item, chemicals mixed inside the item get excited and give off a signal. The signal, which differs with the addition or subtraction of different substances, then serves as an ID for the item."

An ominous article by the New Scientist predicts a new wave of privacy violations:

"New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

Spying on your email without evidence has been officially approved by the US government.

The Secret Service has secretly made a deal with several printer manufacturers to track everything that comes out of your printer. Do you own a color printer? It may be secretly applying a near-invisible series of dots to each print that identify your printer’s serial number, the time and date of prints, and possibly other identifying information. Rigged printers include certain models made by Xerox, Dell, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Toshiba, and IBM, among others. The EFF has published a list of known affected printers. If you find this too hard to believe, check out this tutorial on how to read the secret tracking code that your printer may be applying to your prints.

This raises some serious questions. If the government has secretly made deals with printer manufacturers to spy on you, what other kinds of deals have been made, or will be made? Does the government have other secret deals with computer manufacturers? Software manufacturers? Cell phone manufacturers? The recent revelation of cell phone tapping by the NSA shows that your electronics are without a doubt spying on you. This can only get worse as we move into the age of RFID chips. More about RFID coming soon.

Reuters reports that the New York Times is suing the Pentagon about the recent domestic spying by the NSA.

“The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.”

For readers not familiar with the domestic spying program, more information can be found on Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is written by the viewers and is normally a very good resource, but always be aware that it is easily edited by anyone.)

Contrary to suspicions that were reported in BBC, Microsoft claims that they will not put a secret government backdoor into their new Vista operating system.