A new regulation that will require dog and cat owners to have their pets vaccinated against rabies and an identifying microchip inserted under their skin was received with approval by veterinarians and protest by some cat owners. Until now, nearly 90,000 dogs have had such a chip inserted due to municipal by-laws in about 50 areas, according to Agriculture Ministry chief veterinarian Arnon Shimshony. But it will now become mandatory for pet dogs in the whole country, and a one-year experiment for cats. Israel has apparently become the first country in the world to require dogs and cats to have an identifying chip in their bodies, Shimshony said.

By Christine McGourty

The Daily Telegraph

Veins on the hand could be used to stop cashcard fraud, currently costing banks as much as 100 million pounds a year, if a new device being developed proves successful. Instead of keying in an identification number, cardholders will place a clenched fist into a cash machine for a scanner to read the vein tree". The computer then compares this to the pattern already stored digitally in the card.

Washington Post Service

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service says it will look at your hand -- not your picture -- when coming into the country under an experimental program scheduled to be tested this fall. Arriving passengers will slide an identification card through an automatic reader, put one hand into a boxy scanning device and walk through immigration facilities. Travelers will record certain basic physical characteristics, such as finger size, distance between joints and hand width; this information, in turn, will be recorded on magnetic identification cards that travelers will use to activate the scanners.

A NEW Zealand businessman said this week he would happily volunteer to have a Big Brother-style microchip implanted in his flesh. And he would not hesitate to get his dogs and cat and even his birds fitted with them too. But Neil Wells, national director of the Royal New Zealand SPCA says they would be for different reasons. He would get the animals microchipped so they could be instantly traced if they ever became lost or injured. But he would have himself implanted, said Wells--not for instant identity and credit checks--but to show it doesn't hurt.

"It is almost painless. A chip the size of a grain of rice is implanted in the fat behind the neck by a disposable syringe. Most animals would not feel it." he said.

Wells said he thought his suggestion would stir the Civil Liberties people up a bit. "They may not be ready for such a step yet."

However he said as far as animals were concerned the chips were only a couple of months away. Dogs would probably be first on the list for chips. Cost should be around $55 per animal, said Wells.

"It will be particularly useful in identifying animals that have been stolen. This can often be a real problem. But it will also help vets trace injured animals' owners quickly," said Wells. To operate properly, the scheme will need chip scanners at every pet shelter, SPCA depot, council pound and veterinary clinic in the country.

These scanners were expensive, said Wells, but the firm bringing them in would let the SPCA and the shelters have them free and would lease them to vets. Under a hand-held scanner the transponder in the microchip implant will signal seven alphanumeric characters with 26 letters and 10 figures available for each of the seven characters. This will identify 78 billion recipients.

In the latest issue of the religious weekly Challenge writers George and Eileen Anderson hint at the chip's use in humans. Under a story beginning: "The Mark of the Beast is Already a Reality Overseas" they say:

"At first glance it seems an unnecessarily elaborate system for merely identifying stray dogs. "Obviously it would be a highly-efficient way to identify humans."

 FOOTNOTE: Unconfirmed reports say the chips were used experimentally in the Vietnam War to identify the bodies of US soldiers killed or badly mutilated.

By Dr. Carl W. Sanders

From Nexus Magazine

Thirty two years of my life was spent in design engineering and electronics, designing microchips in the Bio-Med field. In 1968 I became involved, almost by accident, in a research and development project in regard to a spinal bypass for a young lady who had severed her spine. They were looking at possibly being able to connect motor nerves etc. It was a project we were all excited about. There were 100 people involved and I was senior engineer in charge of the project. This project culminated in the microchip that we talk about now -- a microchip that I believe is going to be the positive identification and mark of the beast.

This microchip is recharged by body temperature changes. Obviously you can`t go in and have your battery changed every so often, so the microchip has a recharging circuit that charges based upon the body temperature changes. Over one and a half million dollars was spent finding out that the two places in the body that the temperature changes the most rapidly are in the forehead (primary position), right below the hairline, and the back of the hand (alternative position).

As the chip came to evolve, there came a time in the project when they said that the financial return on bypassing severed spines is not a very lucrative thing for us to be into, so we really need to look at some other areas. We noticed that the frequency of the chip had a great effect upon behaviour, and so we began to branch off and look possibly at behaviour modification.

Microchips can be used for migraine headaches, behaviour modification, upper/downer, sexual stimulant and sexual depressant. This is nothing more than electronic acupuncture, folks. There are 250,000 components in the microchip, including a tiny lithium battery. I fought them over using lithium as a battery source but NASA was doing a lot with lithium at that time and it was the going thing. I had talked to a doctor at the Boston Medical Center about what that concentration of lithium in the body could do if the chip broke down. He said that you would get a boil or grievous sore.

As we developed this microchip, as the identification chip became the focal point, there were several things that were wanted. They wanted a name, an image (picture of your face), social security number with the international digits on it, fingerprint identification, physical description, family history, address, occupation, income tax information and criminal record.

I've been in 17 "one world" meetings where this has been discussed, meetings in Brussels, Luxembourg, tying together the finances of the world. Just recently in the newspapers they've talked about the Health Care Program, the "Womb to Tomb" identification! A positive identification. There are bills before congress right now that will allow them to inject a microchip in your child at the time of birth for identification purposes.

The president of the United States of America, under the "Emigration and Control Act of 1986", Section 100, has the authority to deem whatever type of identification is necessary -- whether it be an invisible tattoo or electronic media under the skin. So I think you have to look at the facts, folks: this is not coming as some big shock. The paving has been done ahead of time.

From 420724-7091 in Stockholm

I am writing this story, becayse I have a 480930-7343 and an 810130-0443 to support.

And I am mentioning 451115-9305, 461216-0038, 500405-2444 and 450425-4931 in this, the second paragraph, because they are so enormously popular in the world outside Sweden and I thought they might help to sell the item.

Of course, in that ouside world, which often seems a long way away, your days are not – as it were – numbered.

Perhaps I should explain.

420724-7091 is my Person Number. Everyone in Sweden has one. My wife Lola is 480930-7343 and out seven-month-old baby daughter, Nina Suzanne, is 810130-0443.

The number in the second paragraph are those of Annifrid Lyngstad, Benny Anderson, Agnetha Faltskog and Bjorn Ulvaeus, members of a local pop group of some repute.

The first part of a Person Number is easy to work out: It is bearer’s date of birth. I was born in (19)42 in the seventh month (07) and on the 24^th day. Hence 420724.

The bit after the dash is more difficult. The digits are chosen at random except for the penultimate one. If it is even (and that includes 0) it means the bearer is female; if it is odd the bearer is male.

The Person Number is on your ID-card, driver’s license, tax form and all official documents relating to you as a person.

Sometimes it can have almost sinister implications. If you are stopped by police, it is fed via walkie-talkie into a computer at headquarters. Within minutes the man on the beat will know all there is to know about you – more specifically if you are on the wanted list or have "previous". If you want credit, you give your Person Number and within a remarkably short time information is released from a central data bank, which gives the company evidence of your credit worthiness (or lack of it). The data bank has to inform you when such an inquiry has been made.

Swedes like the Person Number system, because it is efficient. They register amazement that anyone should find it Brave New World-ish.

My wife does not go around saying how glad she is to be 480930-7343 but she is glad, that it expedites the children’s benefit that the State pays for 810130-0443.

The National School Board has come up with a revolutionary scheme to lessen the burden on the welfare state by an estimated four million kronor. That is the amount is loses each year because people mislay their false teeth.

The board is now calling for a law stipulating that all sets of false teeth be stamped with the owner’s Person Number so that when they are found, they can be returned quickly and efficiently.

And that is as true as my number is 420724-7091. Even if it is a little hard to swallow.

My name by the way is Chris Mosey.

The 44-year-old professor of cybernetics (the science relating humans and technology) from the University of Reading, Britain, had a silicon chip transponder implanted in his left forearm on August 24 last year.

The 3mm-thin, inch-long transponder, which consisted of an electromagnetic coil and three silicon chips, was in Kevin's body for nine days. Whenever a radio signal from sensors outside the body was transmitted to the chip, the coil generated an electric current activating the chip circuitry to produce a 64-bit signal.

This, in turn, switched on his computer, made his office welcome him in the morning, switched on the lights in the corridor, opened doors and helped his secretary trace him on the campus. "With the implant I always knew where he was," she says. "Wouldn't any wife like that!"

The chip in your arm can contain a lot of information--your medical history, your neighborhood's geography, and even your will and testament.

The technology can go a long way in tackling diseases. "There's a person in Augusta in the U.S. who has multiple sclerosis and does not have any control below his diaphragm," says Kevin. "He has an implant connected up to see how he urinates. Remotely they can control when he urinates and when he doesn't." Ross Davis, a neurosurgeon in Augusta, thinks it is possible to control an erection just as easily.

Kevin believes that in five years chips inside humans will carry diverse data, money transfers, medical records, passport details and criminal convictions. They could even act as internal alarm clocks; you could be programmed to sleep for the requisite eight hours. Moreover, since they are inside the body, it is almost impossible to steal them. The global market for implant technology in 20 years is said to touch $20,000 billion.

His critics howled that he was playing God by "technically" upgrading humans. They would howl louder if they knew that the researchers tried to give the chip the number 666, the Mark of the Beast. It somehow did not work and they settled for 161.

Kevin's obsession with technology is rooted in his desire to enhance the capabilities of people and make them superhuman. "It is possible to link technology with humans physically and mentally to improve and enhance what we can do," he says.

Such thoughts must have been churning in him since childhood. His father suffered from agoraphobia, fear of open spaces, and was house-bound for two years when Kevin was about eight. "They drilled a couple of holes in his head and snipped a few connections in his brain," says Kevin. "He was cured, the transformation was superb. Altering somebody's brain is quite an experience."

(David:) It depends on who's altering your brain, and for what purpose! When you receive the Lord, you become one with Him, and get the mind of Christ as He creates new spiritual connections, spiritual rewiring. When you receive the Mark, your brain is being altered by evil men for evil purposes, and you're getting the mind of the Beast. The Lord's alterations are wonderful, whereas those from the Mark are malicious.
The Lord can make people superhuman without any drilling or implants whatsoever. All you have to do is receive Him. He's the implant, ha!
 

I have seen the future and it is personal. Or "personalized." Those were the buzzwords this year at Renaissance Weekend, the gathering of hundreds of accomplished men and women from walks of life as separate as church and state.

"Personalized" was the word favored by Oren Etzioni of the University of Washington, an authority on artificial intelligence. He talked about each of us having an "intelligent agent," that is, an almost invisible friend living, probably, in cellular phones--something like a cross between a bottled genie and the little men who turn on the light when you open a refrigerator.

"You will be able to talk into the phone [or other device] and tell your car you're on your way," he said. "It will know where to go without more help from you…. Or you can say, 'I want to call Chicago' and the phone will get you the best deal on the call." "Or, you can ask a pretzel bag, 'Are you fresh?"' said Bill Cheswick of Bell Labs. He was not kidding. Computer chips will be the size of big gnats. "There are computers in hotel doorknobs right now. Next you'll be talking to light bulbs and shirts." Mr. Cheswick did not tell us what you would talk to the shirt about, but they'll think of something.

The implications of all that are many and enormous, but Mr. Etzioni focused on shopping. Mr. Etzioni said your intelligent agent, which would know everything about you, including shoe size, foot shape and personal quirks would be a shopper with infinite time and patience, even as it worked almost instantaneously everywhere in the world (or on the Web) to find you or me the perfect shoe at the best price. Sorry, Nike. Forget the swoosh, close the stores.

On future medicine, Ian Hunter, a microbiotics professor at MIT, talked about a most personal, inside-out health care system, your own "virtual body." At birth, a "body" would be created from each person's genetic data and as life went on, basic medical examinations would be comparisons between the real you and the projected you of the virtual body. Any differences between the model and the real you would be the first indicator of medical problems.

This is not pie in the sky; this is where we are. Science is moving and changing so fast now that John Cramer, a University of Washington physicist, who certainly spoke for me, said the only thing we can be certain of is that "everything we know is wrong."

Sometimes gun-toting bodyguards, armored limousines and clever disguises just aren't enough. Now the rich and famous of the world are being offered a new kind of protection to keep them from the greedy clutches of ransom-seeking kidnappers: A microchip that will be implanted under their skin.

The device is being marketed to the world's richest families as protection against the booming worldwide business in abductions, which has risen by 60 percent in the last eight years, especially in impoverished and corrupt countries like Mexico, Chechnya and the Philippines.

The new technology, reported by the Times of London, is a low-power chip that sucks electrical energy from the body itself and--according to the Gen-Etics corporation that makes the things--can be detected by Global Positioning System satellites circling the globe.

Designed first by the Israeli spy-masters of the Mossad, Gen-Etics is launching the new "Sky-Eye" chips in Milan, Italy. The company told the Times that it has already stitched the $7,500 gadget into 45 of the world's richest people.

Once a person "wearing" a Sky-Eye chip is abducted, cops and security teams will track his or her location using the satellites and--presumably--send in a commando squad to rescue them. The Sky-Eye is said to have a margin of error of just 150 yards.

But what if the kidnappers decide to tear the thing out themselves? Gen-Etics doesn't have a perfect answer for that question, although they're trying. First, the actual surgery to insert the tiny chip is done under an anesthetic that makes it impossible for the kidnap victim to even remember where it was put in. Second, the thing is so small--just 4 mm by 4 mm, and running on just a few milliamperes of the body's own natural electricity--that it doesn't show up on x-rays.

SINGAPORE -- Take out your wallet and count the number of cards you carry, not to mention all the Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) that you have to memorize for every possible transaction.

Then there is your passport, driver's license, insurance documents, not to mention details like home and work addresses, phone and fax numbers.

All that information, says BT Laboratories' Peter Cochrane, can be put into a single silicon chip on a smart card. Everything from employment and medical records to financial status can be written into the chip. Add a short-range wireless transmitter-receiver, implant the whole thing under your skin, and you have a personal transponder, just like those in airplanes.

A chip like that can give you total freedom, according to Professor Cochrane. You walk into an airport and clear Customs and Immigrations in minutes because all your personal information will be processed by computers instead of humans. Since all your financial information is also in the chip, you can simply walk up to an ATM machine in any country and withdraw money as and when you need it.

Even grocery-shopping could be easier. Just walk into a store and pick up whatever you want to buy. No more queues at the cashier's counter.

All this could be reality in 10 years time.

When Kevin Warwick walks into his office, doors open, lights switch on, and a digitized voice says, "Welcome, Professor Warwick." It also lets him know if he has e-mail and how many messages there are. And his secretary can glance at a com-puter screen and instantly find out where he is in the building, routing him a phone call or calling him for a meeting as appropriate.

He could have created the same effects by tucking a smart card into the pocket of his tweed jacket. But by opting to implant a small (23 mm by 3 mm) silicon chip under his skin, Professor Warwick claims to have become the world's first cyborg--part man, part machine.

The human as computer had many applications, Professor Warwick said. "Possibilities could be that anyone who wanted access to a gun could do so only if they had one of these implants. Then if they try to enter a school or building that doesn't want them in there, the school computer would sound alarms and warn people inside or even prevent them having access.

"In five years' time, we will be able to do chips with all sorts of information on them. They could be used for money transfers, medical records, passports, driving licenses, and loyalty cards. If they are implanted they are impossible to steal. The potential is enormous," he said.

His daughter quips that he's crazy, and his wife says that the experiment "turns her stomach," but the soft-spoken chairman of the Cybernetics Department at the University of Reading in England doesn't sound like a send-up from a sci-fi convention.

"I come from a background of machine intelligence, looking at how intelligent machines are likely to be in the future," says Warwick. "There is a school of thought that says that the way humans can keep up with machines is to have silicon implants helping our intelligence, but it's been a bit science-fictiony. I thought technically we can go at least part of the way in that direction, so I went and had a go at it. What I can do now is fairly limited, but it shows some of the possibilities."

The idea of man empowered by digital ability has always raised ethical issues and deeper questions about what it means to be human. Those issues get tougher as the distinction between man and machine blurs.

When humans started interacting with computers in a box in the 1950s, they called them tools. When students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, started wearing their computers in recent years, they called themselves "cyborgs." [See END #7, pg.10, "Beyond Humanity."] Warwick's experiment brings the computer literally under the skin.

There are good reasons to do this, Warwick says: For example, such chips could connect up with the human nervous system and help people with disabilities. "Imagine yourself directly connected with a computer, with the memory capacity of that computer at your disposal. Imagine being able to visualize with X-rays, ultraviolet rays, ultrasonic rays, infrared rays--to see in every way that a computer can see: That's where the forefront of technology is," he says, in a phone interview.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has been studying how people interact with computers since the late 1970s. "The question of how you define the boundaries of the body have increasingly been on people's minds as they think about the computer, because people are beginning to sense that the computer is coming closer and closer to the skin," she says.

She finds that when people are asked what they would be comfortable implanting if they had a chip that communicates directly with the brain, many make a distinction between instrumental knowledge, such as calculus or foreign languages, and a course on music or Shakespeare. They'll accept the chip's take on how to speak German but not on how to understand Goethe.

Ms. Turkle said, "Implanting a chip is not very far from wearing it on your glasses or having it in your ear. We find it disturbing now, but the question is, will we find it disturbing in 10 years?"

Also to be resolved: What if the applications for close-to-the-skin computing turn out to be not so warm and fuzzy. Researchers at Reading warn that smart buildings could evolve into more than a cheery "good morning" for workers.

"Within businesses, individuals with implants could be clocked in and out of their office automatically," the University of Reading Web site states. "It would be known at all times exactly where an individual was within a building and whom they were with…. Is this what we want?"

Of course, no company would really want that kind of control over its staff. Or would it? The evidence suggests that your employer wants to know much, much more about you--enough to tap your phones, read your e-mail and video your movements.

In the US, research by the American Management Association has revealed that 40 percent of companies keep a log of their workers' phone calls while 16 percent videotape employees.

Under current legislation, companies are permitted "within reason" to place all employees under constant surveillance. They are free to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, censor e-mail, install spy cameras, even analyze urine in the toilets to detect drug use.