chips in immigrants

[Harold F. Schiffman]

When I first forwarded the file about RFID chips, I imagined satires that
would claim that you could implant a chip that would also do instant
translation (!) and therefore would solve the English-only problem as
well.  Wilder things have been claimed for automated translation programs,
so why not this? After all, C3PO could handle 60,000,000 languages, and he
was designed and built by the young Annekin Skywalker.

Hal Schiffman

On Tue, 6 Jun 2006 phaney at mail.utexas.edu wrote:

>
>
> A small point, but the other thing about those chips is that anybody with a
> little knowledge about that technology can falsify them.  A couple of months
> ago, a tech commentator named Annalee Newitz appeared on Democracy Now!
> desribing her experiment with an RFID chip.  She had one implanted in her arm,
> then had a friend try to detect the signal and fabricate a chip that could
> duplicate it.  It took him about 15 minutes using equipment available at any
> Radio Shack.  So this proposal amounts to a plan to throw a lot of pork barrell
> money at VeriChip and force a lot of immigrants to throw their money at
> tech-savvy coyotes.  They already falsify social security cards.  Why not this?
>
> --Pete Haney
>