fm:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americ...eut/index.html
Mexico attorney general gets microchip implant
MEXICO CITY, Mexico (Reuters) -- Mexico's attorney general said on Monday he had had a microchip inserted under the skin of one of his arms to give him access to a new crime database and also enable him to be traced if he is ever abducted.
Attorney General Rafael Macedo said a number of his staff had also been fitted with chips which will give them exclusive and secure access to a national, computerized database for crime investigators that went live on Monday.
"It's an area of high security, it's necessary that we have access to this, through a chip, which what's more is unremovable," Macedo told reporters.
"The system is here and I already have it. It's solely for access, for safety and so that I can be located at any moment wherever I am," he said, admitting the chip hurt "a little."
The chips would enable the wearer to be found anywhere inside Mexico, in the event of an assault or kidnapping, said Macedo.
And kidnapping is a huge problem here. From 1992 to 2002, Mexico saw some 15,000 kidnappings, second only to war-torn Colombia, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
Crime-fighting is a dangerous business in Mexico, where police are notoriously corrupt and where political figures and investigative journalists sometimes risk assassination.
Mexico has seen a surge in violent crime recently, with an onslaught of headlines about murders and kidnappings prompting Fox to pledge in a national broadcast to crack down on crime.
In June a quarter of a million people protested the government's failure to combat crime.
Quote:
Originally posted by geoschmo:
This GPS tracking chip isn't that farfetched. It doesn't take a huge amount of power to broadcast a simple digital code. It's not like you need enough bandwith to send audio or video signals. The emergency locator beacon for emergency raft on an aircraft can be picked up by satelites. It's not much bigger then a roll of quarters and that's almost all battery. And that's 30+ year old technology. They already have implantable devices that work like a credit card/identification device. The chip itself has no internal power supply, it's just an inductor that picks up a signal from the chip reader and uses that for power to rebroadcast. The same company that makes them claims they are only a few months/couple years from a marketable GPS chip for humans.
I'll try to find a link. I was just reading about it a couple weeks ago.
|