Post by Watchman on Jul 9, 2005 12:26:49 GMT -5
By Craig Offman
One night in Barcelona last year, a young Dutchman named Antoine Hazelaar received a strange proposition from the owner of a local nightspot, the Baja Beach Club. The club had just started a new programme called “VipChip”, he was told, and for E125, a qualified nurse could inject a device the size of a grain of rice, a “VeriChip”, into his upper arm. Once implanted, it would transmit an ID number to a scanner that would recognise Hazelaar as a special customer, so he wouldn’t have to wait in line and would get access to a private lounge. Since he would be one of the first people to be injected, the nightclub’s management would waive the initiation fee.
Hazelaar agreed. At about 8pm one spring evening, in front of a throng of journalists, he sat down on a sofa in the cavernous Baja with another Dutch expat and a Spanish woman, ready to be injected. Bandages, needles and syringes were ceremoniously laid out on a cocktail table. Thanks to a local anaesthetic, Hazelaar didn’t feel the long shaft, about the size of a large sewing needle, as it entered his flesh. He didn’t feel the chip either, and a year later, he still doesn’t. “I forgot that I had it until you called,” he said.
Now, every time Hazelaar visits the Baja, he strides past the queue outside and goes straight to the doorman, who scans his arm until his name and photograph pop up on a computer screen. When he goes through another checkpoint at the special VipChip lounge, the number under his flesh becomes a payment instrument, like a loyalty card at Starbucks.
A waitress runs a scanner over his right bicep and the cost of a drink is deducted from his account.
As it turns out, Hazelaar became one of the world’s first human debit cards. But he wasn’t the last. The Baja now has 90 implanted VIPs; there are 70 at its sister club in Rotterdam, which opened last November. Even though the injection now costs E1,500 per person - including a E500 drinks credit - both establishments have waiting lists. Club co-owner Conrad Chase, a former star of the Spanish version of Big Brother, says his group might expand to Valencia and Hamburg, where they will also offer “VipChip” membership.
Some might say that this technology was inevitable, but how has this slightly creepy device become even remotely popular? And will it one day become part of everyday life?
The roots of the VeriChip can be traced back to the second world war, when Britain’s Royal Air Force developed “Friend or Foe Identification”, a radio-frequency recognition system that helped Allied forces tell which blips on a radar screen were enemy fighters and which were their own. Special transmitters were fitted on fighter planes so that, as pilots flew back to their bases, radar crews could send up signals from the ground - to which the planes could respond with a code that would identify their crew as “friendly”.
The technology improved over the next three decades, as scientists in the US and Europe tried to extend its uses. By the early 1980s, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had come up with a tiny injectable glass tube encasing a transmitter that could be used to keep track of farm animals.
”The best place to put it was in their back, where the animals couldn’t scratch at it,” said Jeremy Landt, one of the scientists who worked at Los Alamos.
By the mid-1990s, office workers were using low-frequency forms of RFID (radio frequency identification device) technology to enter company buildings and access their floors. It was also used in toll-road systems, such as New York’s E-Z Pass. Remote keyless entry, which uses passive radio frequency identification technology to open car doors with a button, became a standard feature on new cars, and similar technology was used in pet tracking devices. Then someone had an idea: why not put it in humans?
In 2000, a New Jersey surgeon named Richard Seelig was following RFID activity with fervent interest. Seelig was a consultant to several US medical companies and he believed that an injectable microchip had a lot of potential for patients.
When Seelig read that a Florida-based company, Applied Digital Solutions (ADS), was thinking along similar lines, he contacted the company’s then chief executive, Richard Sullivan, and became a consultant. ADS had a split corporate personality at that time: one bland and bureaucratic, the other fanciful and futuristic.
Most of ADS’s income came from government contracts to provide secure voice, data and video equipment. But the company was also interested in tracking devices, and had just bought Destron-Fearing, a Minnesota-based company that specialised in subcutaneous animal tags. Seelig took a close look at the tag: it was well-engineered, had proven longevity, and didn’t move about in the body. What would happen, he wondered, if it were put in a person instead of a cow?
In February 2001, he made a presentation to management for a human chip, but ADS executives were not taken with the idea. “The business model wasn’t clear enough,” Seelig said. At that stage, ADS was primarily a mergers and acquisitions-minded company, and product development wasn’t high on its agenda.
September 11 2001 changed that. Seelig was in New York at the time and eyewitnesses told him they had seen firemen writing their badge ID numbers on their chests in case they were found injured or unconscious. “I realised that a microchip wasn’t just an important medical device,” said Seelig, “there was also a crying need for personal information in situations where, for instance, there were rescue workers.”
Five days later, without telling his colleagues at ADS, Seelig injected two capsules into his body, one near his hip, another on his forearm. Neither implant bothered him. In November 2001 he told the company principals what he had done. “They said, ‘You did what’?” he remembers.
Eventually, he persuaded his managers that a human chip could be a viable product for ADS. The company developed the idea further and came up with the name “VeriChip” for both the device itself and a subsidiary company, launched in December 2001, to produce and market it.
When news of the ADS chip was broadcast on a local television station in early 2002, one 14-year-old in Boca Raton, Florida, watched with close interest. Derek Jacobs was something of a science prodigy. Microsoft had made him a qualified systems engineer at the age of 12, and after he watched a news report on VeriChip he told his mother that he wanted to be one of the first people to be implanted.
This was not a far-fetched idea, medically speaking. Derek was allergic to a number of antibiotics. But his father, Jeffrey Jacobs, was in much worse health. Jeffrey, a dentist, had survived cancer and a debilitating car crash, and was fighting both a degenerative spinal condition and chronic eye disease. His family worried that if he were ever taken to hospital without his wife or son, hospital staff unaware of his medical history might make fatal mistakes. If Jeffrey Jacobs had a VeriChip in his arm, they thought, doctors could scan him for a transmitter, upload his ID number, type it into a computer database and instantly get all the information needed to treat him. Jacobs, his wife Leslie, and Derek decided they would all be chipped. NBC’s The Today Show broadcast their injections on May 10 2002 and the family became known as the “Chipsons”.
The publicity proved immensely useful to ADS. A day before the Jacobs were injected, the company announced that more than a dozen local hospitals in the area had given verbal agreements to use its proprietary scanners. Thousands of people, including children, wanted to be injected, executives claimed. But they would have to wait. The device did not have Food and Drug Administration approval, and the FDA warned ADS to stop marketing it after the Jacobs family was injected. On May 17, news broke that the FDA was investigating whether it needed to regulate the device, thereby starting a two-year examination of the product.
The company switched focus to another, even more radical device: a transmitter, 2.5 inches in diameter, that - once inserted near the collarbone - could be tracked almost everywhere. The reaction this time was mixed. Fundamentalist Christians thought it was a forerunner of the “end of days” described in the Book of Revelations, which had prophesied people with numbers under their flesh.
By this time, ADS itself was in trouble. A series of shareholder class action suits alleging it had misrepresented its financial figures and exaggerated its relationship with local hospitals - which, ultimately, did not commit to using VeriChip scanners - ended up costing ADS $5.6m. Its share price, which had been as high as $22, plummeted, and it teetered towards bankruptcy. In March 2003, Richard Sullivan left the company. He was replaced by Scott Silverman, ADS’s former president, who set about slashing costs and employees (from 2,600 to 400). The company survived, and, with it, the human microchip.
Scott Silverman is a sturdily built former telecoms lawyer with a chip implanted in his right arm. When we met in his lavish wood-panelled office at ADS’s headquarters in Delray Beach, Florida, the 41-year-old rolled up his sleeve and showed me the seamless site of the implant.
ADS uses the device primarily for security: the transponder is recognised by scanners located in several doorways throughout the company’s offices. It’s the same kind of recognition system found in many office buildings - but in this case, the scanner communicates through the flesh, not through the skin of a wallet. Seven VeriChip employees are also chipped, including the company’s chief executive, Kevin McLaughlin.
Although VeriChip wasn’t making any profits for ADS, it was still creating a lot of publicity. The injections at the Baja Beach Club attracted international attention in April 2004. Three months later, Mexico’s then attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, and 18 of his staff were implanted for security purposes. On October 13 last year, VeriChip received the most important news of all: after a two-year wait, the FDA had approved the device for medical applications. The future of ADS, and VeriChip, began to look a lot rosier.
Within five months, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston and the cutting-edge Hackensack University Medical Centre in New Jersey agreed to use the technology in their emergency departments.
The FDA’s approval did not come without warnings, however: the tag could travel through the body; there might be adverse tissue reaction; and the chip might be difficult to extract. But the device was gaining important advocates. John Halamka, the chief information officer of both Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School, pointed out that doctors often had to fish out foreign objects from the flesh. Halamka himself was chipped last December, and says he suffered no complications. “I’m a big fan of pilot trials,” said Halamka. “And this one is low-risk.” But privacy advocates were worried. They predicted hackers could steal someone’s digital ID number. “It’s a number associated with you that can be picked up by other people - it can broadcast itself to strangers,” said Katherine Albrecht, a frequent critic of RFID and Harvard doctoral candidate who runs the website Spychips.com. Once a number was stolen, she said, it could be used along with other purloined data to impersonate the victim. “It’s a social security number on steroids,” she said.
Last February, a group of Johns Hopkins University graduate students used a low-cost scanner to intercept the digital communication between a car key and the ignition. The group performed the same task with SpeedPass, a wireless debit system used to purchase petrol from MobilExxon.
VeriChip admits that it would be possible for a hacker to find out someone’s chip number. “I’ll concede that if someone wants to waste time, they can do that,” says Seelig. “But the question is, what’s the yield?” In other words, even if hackers managed to obtain someone’s 16-digit chip number, the information would be useless - unless they could also hack into VeriChip’s database. Many corporations, Seelig emphasises, face the same security issues. “Do people cut up their ATM cards because they are afraid that their information may be stolen? It’s a choice that customers make.”
Scott Silverman says the VeriChip actually enhances privacy. “How is your personal identification stolen? People literally picking through your trash, or people sifting through the ‘digital dust’ you leave after you surf the internet. If the information is underneath the skin, tamper-proof and secure, the chances of people taking your information is lessened, not heightened.”
But civil libertarians still worry that corporations or government agencies might eventually coerce employees to wear the implants to monitor their productivity and their whereabouts. Marlin Schneider, a state representative in Wisconsin, recently introduced a bill to his assembly that would ban coercive chipping. “If someone wants a VeriChip in his body, that’s fine,” says Schneider, the longest-standing representative in the assembly, “but I don’t think you want your employer to know about every time you take a whizz.”
About 1,000 people around the world have now been implanted with a VeriChip. In February, info-tech security veteran Joe Krull, the man who coined the term “digital dust”, had himself chipped. Two months later, the chief of police in the New Jersey county of Bergen, Jack Schmidig, was injected. At around the same time, VeriChip bought a Canadian RFID company, eXI, whose tracking devices have been used to stop babies being stolen from maternity wards and to monitor wandering patients.
Last month, VeriChip announced that it had hired financial consultant Raymond James to maximise shareholder value, or, as some analysts suspect, help to spin off the company.
When asked about VeriChip’s prospects, RFID pioneer and Los Alamos scientist Jeremy Landt says that the technology still has a way to go. “You need implementation and you need to take care of the legal aspects,” he said. Once consumers are aware of the implications, he added, they will decide if the benefits outweigh the security concerns.
Ultimately, the choice is fear versus fear. What makes people feel most vulnerable? A hacker running up to them with a scanner, or news stories of rampant ID theft, infant abductions, botched surgeries, convicts on the run and terrorists among us? The VeriChip may be an extreme solution for extreme times, but the days when it could be dismissed as futuristic fancy are clearly long past.
One night in Barcelona last year, a young Dutchman named Antoine Hazelaar received a strange proposition from the owner of a local nightspot, the Baja Beach Club. The club had just started a new programme called “VipChip”, he was told, and for E125, a qualified nurse could inject a device the size of a grain of rice, a “VeriChip”, into his upper arm. Once implanted, it would transmit an ID number to a scanner that would recognise Hazelaar as a special customer, so he wouldn’t have to wait in line and would get access to a private lounge. Since he would be one of the first people to be injected, the nightclub’s management would waive the initiation fee.
Hazelaar agreed. At about 8pm one spring evening, in front of a throng of journalists, he sat down on a sofa in the cavernous Baja with another Dutch expat and a Spanish woman, ready to be injected. Bandages, needles and syringes were ceremoniously laid out on a cocktail table. Thanks to a local anaesthetic, Hazelaar didn’t feel the long shaft, about the size of a large sewing needle, as it entered his flesh. He didn’t feel the chip either, and a year later, he still doesn’t. “I forgot that I had it until you called,” he said.
Now, every time Hazelaar visits the Baja, he strides past the queue outside and goes straight to the doorman, who scans his arm until his name and photograph pop up on a computer screen. When he goes through another checkpoint at the special VipChip lounge, the number under his flesh becomes a payment instrument, like a loyalty card at Starbucks.
A waitress runs a scanner over his right bicep and the cost of a drink is deducted from his account.
As it turns out, Hazelaar became one of the world’s first human debit cards. But he wasn’t the last. The Baja now has 90 implanted VIPs; there are 70 at its sister club in Rotterdam, which opened last November. Even though the injection now costs E1,500 per person - including a E500 drinks credit - both establishments have waiting lists. Club co-owner Conrad Chase, a former star of the Spanish version of Big Brother, says his group might expand to Valencia and Hamburg, where they will also offer “VipChip” membership.
Some might say that this technology was inevitable, but how has this slightly creepy device become even remotely popular? And will it one day become part of everyday life?
The roots of the VeriChip can be traced back to the second world war, when Britain’s Royal Air Force developed “Friend or Foe Identification”, a radio-frequency recognition system that helped Allied forces tell which blips on a radar screen were enemy fighters and which were their own. Special transmitters were fitted on fighter planes so that, as pilots flew back to their bases, radar crews could send up signals from the ground - to which the planes could respond with a code that would identify their crew as “friendly”.
The technology improved over the next three decades, as scientists in the US and Europe tried to extend its uses. By the early 1980s, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had come up with a tiny injectable glass tube encasing a transmitter that could be used to keep track of farm animals.
”The best place to put it was in their back, where the animals couldn’t scratch at it,” said Jeremy Landt, one of the scientists who worked at Los Alamos.
By the mid-1990s, office workers were using low-frequency forms of RFID (radio frequency identification device) technology to enter company buildings and access their floors. It was also used in toll-road systems, such as New York’s E-Z Pass. Remote keyless entry, which uses passive radio frequency identification technology to open car doors with a button, became a standard feature on new cars, and similar technology was used in pet tracking devices. Then someone had an idea: why not put it in humans?
In 2000, a New Jersey surgeon named Richard Seelig was following RFID activity with fervent interest. Seelig was a consultant to several US medical companies and he believed that an injectable microchip had a lot of potential for patients.
When Seelig read that a Florida-based company, Applied Digital Solutions (ADS), was thinking along similar lines, he contacted the company’s then chief executive, Richard Sullivan, and became a consultant. ADS had a split corporate personality at that time: one bland and bureaucratic, the other fanciful and futuristic.
Most of ADS’s income came from government contracts to provide secure voice, data and video equipment. But the company was also interested in tracking devices, and had just bought Destron-Fearing, a Minnesota-based company that specialised in subcutaneous animal tags. Seelig took a close look at the tag: it was well-engineered, had proven longevity, and didn’t move about in the body. What would happen, he wondered, if it were put in a person instead of a cow?
In February 2001, he made a presentation to management for a human chip, but ADS executives were not taken with the idea. “The business model wasn’t clear enough,” Seelig said. At that stage, ADS was primarily a mergers and acquisitions-minded company, and product development wasn’t high on its agenda.
September 11 2001 changed that. Seelig was in New York at the time and eyewitnesses told him they had seen firemen writing their badge ID numbers on their chests in case they were found injured or unconscious. “I realised that a microchip wasn’t just an important medical device,” said Seelig, “there was also a crying need for personal information in situations where, for instance, there were rescue workers.”
Five days later, without telling his colleagues at ADS, Seelig injected two capsules into his body, one near his hip, another on his forearm. Neither implant bothered him. In November 2001 he told the company principals what he had done. “They said, ‘You did what’?” he remembers.
Eventually, he persuaded his managers that a human chip could be a viable product for ADS. The company developed the idea further and came up with the name “VeriChip” for both the device itself and a subsidiary company, launched in December 2001, to produce and market it.
When news of the ADS chip was broadcast on a local television station in early 2002, one 14-year-old in Boca Raton, Florida, watched with close interest. Derek Jacobs was something of a science prodigy. Microsoft had made him a qualified systems engineer at the age of 12, and after he watched a news report on VeriChip he told his mother that he wanted to be one of the first people to be implanted.
This was not a far-fetched idea, medically speaking. Derek was allergic to a number of antibiotics. But his father, Jeffrey Jacobs, was in much worse health. Jeffrey, a dentist, had survived cancer and a debilitating car crash, and was fighting both a degenerative spinal condition and chronic eye disease. His family worried that if he were ever taken to hospital without his wife or son, hospital staff unaware of his medical history might make fatal mistakes. If Jeffrey Jacobs had a VeriChip in his arm, they thought, doctors could scan him for a transmitter, upload his ID number, type it into a computer database and instantly get all the information needed to treat him. Jacobs, his wife Leslie, and Derek decided they would all be chipped. NBC’s The Today Show broadcast their injections on May 10 2002 and the family became known as the “Chipsons”.
The publicity proved immensely useful to ADS. A day before the Jacobs were injected, the company announced that more than a dozen local hospitals in the area had given verbal agreements to use its proprietary scanners. Thousands of people, including children, wanted to be injected, executives claimed. But they would have to wait. The device did not have Food and Drug Administration approval, and the FDA warned ADS to stop marketing it after the Jacobs family was injected. On May 17, news broke that the FDA was investigating whether it needed to regulate the device, thereby starting a two-year examination of the product.
The company switched focus to another, even more radical device: a transmitter, 2.5 inches in diameter, that - once inserted near the collarbone - could be tracked almost everywhere. The reaction this time was mixed. Fundamentalist Christians thought it was a forerunner of the “end of days” described in the Book of Revelations, which had prophesied people with numbers under their flesh.
By this time, ADS itself was in trouble. A series of shareholder class action suits alleging it had misrepresented its financial figures and exaggerated its relationship with local hospitals - which, ultimately, did not commit to using VeriChip scanners - ended up costing ADS $5.6m. Its share price, which had been as high as $22, plummeted, and it teetered towards bankruptcy. In March 2003, Richard Sullivan left the company. He was replaced by Scott Silverman, ADS’s former president, who set about slashing costs and employees (from 2,600 to 400). The company survived, and, with it, the human microchip.
Scott Silverman is a sturdily built former telecoms lawyer with a chip implanted in his right arm. When we met in his lavish wood-panelled office at ADS’s headquarters in Delray Beach, Florida, the 41-year-old rolled up his sleeve and showed me the seamless site of the implant.
ADS uses the device primarily for security: the transponder is recognised by scanners located in several doorways throughout the company’s offices. It’s the same kind of recognition system found in many office buildings - but in this case, the scanner communicates through the flesh, not through the skin of a wallet. Seven VeriChip employees are also chipped, including the company’s chief executive, Kevin McLaughlin.
Although VeriChip wasn’t making any profits for ADS, it was still creating a lot of publicity. The injections at the Baja Beach Club attracted international attention in April 2004. Three months later, Mexico’s then attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, and 18 of his staff were implanted for security purposes. On October 13 last year, VeriChip received the most important news of all: after a two-year wait, the FDA had approved the device for medical applications. The future of ADS, and VeriChip, began to look a lot rosier.
Within five months, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston and the cutting-edge Hackensack University Medical Centre in New Jersey agreed to use the technology in their emergency departments.
The FDA’s approval did not come without warnings, however: the tag could travel through the body; there might be adverse tissue reaction; and the chip might be difficult to extract. But the device was gaining important advocates. John Halamka, the chief information officer of both Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School, pointed out that doctors often had to fish out foreign objects from the flesh. Halamka himself was chipped last December, and says he suffered no complications. “I’m a big fan of pilot trials,” said Halamka. “And this one is low-risk.” But privacy advocates were worried. They predicted hackers could steal someone’s digital ID number. “It’s a number associated with you that can be picked up by other people - it can broadcast itself to strangers,” said Katherine Albrecht, a frequent critic of RFID and Harvard doctoral candidate who runs the website Spychips.com. Once a number was stolen, she said, it could be used along with other purloined data to impersonate the victim. “It’s a social security number on steroids,” she said.
Last February, a group of Johns Hopkins University graduate students used a low-cost scanner to intercept the digital communication between a car key and the ignition. The group performed the same task with SpeedPass, a wireless debit system used to purchase petrol from MobilExxon.
VeriChip admits that it would be possible for a hacker to find out someone’s chip number. “I’ll concede that if someone wants to waste time, they can do that,” says Seelig. “But the question is, what’s the yield?” In other words, even if hackers managed to obtain someone’s 16-digit chip number, the information would be useless - unless they could also hack into VeriChip’s database. Many corporations, Seelig emphasises, face the same security issues. “Do people cut up their ATM cards because they are afraid that their information may be stolen? It’s a choice that customers make.”
Scott Silverman says the VeriChip actually enhances privacy. “How is your personal identification stolen? People literally picking through your trash, or people sifting through the ‘digital dust’ you leave after you surf the internet. If the information is underneath the skin, tamper-proof and secure, the chances of people taking your information is lessened, not heightened.”
But civil libertarians still worry that corporations or government agencies might eventually coerce employees to wear the implants to monitor their productivity and their whereabouts. Marlin Schneider, a state representative in Wisconsin, recently introduced a bill to his assembly that would ban coercive chipping. “If someone wants a VeriChip in his body, that’s fine,” says Schneider, the longest-standing representative in the assembly, “but I don’t think you want your employer to know about every time you take a whizz.”
About 1,000 people around the world have now been implanted with a VeriChip. In February, info-tech security veteran Joe Krull, the man who coined the term “digital dust”, had himself chipped. Two months later, the chief of police in the New Jersey county of Bergen, Jack Schmidig, was injected. At around the same time, VeriChip bought a Canadian RFID company, eXI, whose tracking devices have been used to stop babies being stolen from maternity wards and to monitor wandering patients.
Last month, VeriChip announced that it had hired financial consultant Raymond James to maximise shareholder value, or, as some analysts suspect, help to spin off the company.
When asked about VeriChip’s prospects, RFID pioneer and Los Alamos scientist Jeremy Landt says that the technology still has a way to go. “You need implementation and you need to take care of the legal aspects,” he said. Once consumers are aware of the implications, he added, they will decide if the benefits outweigh the security concerns.
Ultimately, the choice is fear versus fear. What makes people feel most vulnerable? A hacker running up to them with a scanner, or news stories of rampant ID theft, infant abductions, botched surgeries, convicts on the run and terrorists among us? The VeriChip may be an extreme solution for extreme times, but the days when it could be dismissed as futuristic fancy are clearly long past.