In fact, humans are already guinea pigs in such a trial. Plastic surgeon Grant Stevens of Marina Del Rey, Calif. has fitted more than a dozen women with soy- filled breast implants as part of a Food & Drug Administration trial. The implants contain the same kind of microchip used in animals. The chips are meant to redress a common problem in breast-implant care: Patients forget important details about their cases. A number on the microchip allows a hospital to retrieve that information from a database.

No place to hide

Forbes; New York; Sep 22, 1997; Ann Marsh;

Volume: 160

Issue: 6

Start Page: 226-234

ISSN: 00156914

Subject Terms: Manycompanies

Technological change

Privacy

Surveillance

High technology

Applications

Surveillance

Privacy

Future

Technology

Security

Classification Codes: 5400: Research & development

1200: Social policy

8650: Electrical, electronics, instrumentation industries

A snapshot of new tracking technologies is presented. Sales of global- positioning satellite equipment totaled $867 million in 1994 and should exceed $8 billion in 2000. Now $250 million, the still-embryonic market for radio frequency identification devices will grow by 35% a year over the next 5 years. These are often passive radio transponders small as a grain of rice. Subcutaneous chips, spy planes are also discussed. Potential helpful and harmful applications of these new technologies are discussed.

Get ready for the surveillance society. It will make things tougher for killers, rapists, cheating husbands and bad guys in general. It will also play hell with your privacy and be very convenient for potential dictators.

TYPICAL AMERICAN FAMILY, c. 2008. Above their home, foot-long robot airplanes patrol several hundred feet up, on the lookout for criminals and even casual pot smokers. Both family cars are equipped with global-positioning satellite receivers and locator beacons. Devices pinned to the kids' shirts sound an alarm if they wander too close to the street. Mom and Dad carry cell phones that double as personal locators that can find them anywhere on the planet. The parents, the kids and the dogs all have microchips under their skin with ID and medical data.

There's lively debate as to whether surveillance technology will bring on Orwell's 1984, making us all slaves of the state, or constitute a giant step toward human freedom. Either way, the damned thing is practically here. Let the chips fall where they may.

When the E-ZPass electronic toll booth system opened for business in New York City, the authorities announced that they would release travel information to the police only under subpoena or to investigate a crime against the toll authority itself. Two months ago the rule was changed: Now the E-Zpass database is available to police when they are investigating any serious crime. They apparently decided that the theoretical risks were worth taking if the cops could use the information to grab a rapist, a terrorist, an Andrew Cunanan.

This year more than 10,000 Cadillac buyers bought the OnStar satellite- positioning service. The equipment calls a live operator who gives directions or other assistance (see box, p. 234); it also has a feature that automatically alerts the operator to call 911 whenever an air bag is deployed. So far there have been 23 calls to 911 after accidents. A couple of lives may have been saved. Already.

What follows is a snapshot of the new tracking technologies. Most, like the satellite-positioning systems for cars, are active. That means they use their own power sources to generate and receive signals from monitors. Some are passive devices that respond to scanners on entering electromagnetic fields- like the antitheft tags used by retailers.

Roads and rails

Can your husband use OnStar to find out whether you really went out on a business call? "Big Brother we do not want to be," says Jeffrey Depew, head marketer for General Motors' OnStar service, which is now in three types of Cadillacs and rolls out in 21 other GM models next year. "We will tell the police where a vehicle is, but not just any individual. We do not want to be a national detective service."

Still, GM hopes that OnStar will offer an entree for selling other services, such as instantaneous engine diagnostics or traffic reports.

Sales of global-positioning satellite equipment totaled $867 million in 1994 and should exceed $8 billion in 2000. Once exclusively military, GPS receivers today are bought by commercial users in nine out of ten cases. Most long-haul trucking lines now use services like San Diego-based OmniTracs, a division of Qualcomm, or HighwayMaster Communications of Dallas. Satellite positioning is an option in car models from Ford, BMW and Honda.

Stolen-car recovery services like LoJack of Boston and Teletrac of Kansas City home in on radio beacons to track stolen cars. Teletrac's specialty is fleet management: it helps manage the vehicle fleets of utilities, cable companies and bakeries.

Using Teletrac, a company's dispatcher can send the nearest truck to a customer, cutting down on slack time. He can also review records of a route and verify the exact time it took to complete a job-helpful in billing disputes. If a vehicle is stolen, a silent alarm alerts someone at the Teletrac command center, who informs the company and helps police track it. For an installation charge of about $1,000 plus $15 a month, an individual in Los Angeles or Miami can get a Teletrac transmitter for a personal car.

Here's a perfect case of a device that both promotes safety and offers opportunities for snooping. James Frazier, who runs an Internet software company called Gorillagent in Los Angeles, bought Teletrac because his wife, Diane, got a job in a dicey part of the city. Frazier demonstrates by phoning the tracking system called Ozz.

"The vehicle is traveling west on the Santa Monica Freeway near Fairfax at 30 miles per hour," Ozz says in a stilted voice.

Good. Frazier knows where Diane is on her commute home. Using Touch-Tone commands on the phone, he can remotely unlock and lock her car doors. This feature comes in handy if Diane accidentally locks the keys in the car. But it's also a good way to get her to turn on her cell phone and call.

The phone rings. "Hi. What's up?" Diane asks. Frazier asks her to detour to Westwood. He'll meet her there. They can just catch the early showing of Men in Black.

Police in Southern California nabbed a lot of criminals by sneaking transmitters onto suspects' cars. Civil libertarians objected. A proposed state statute would compel the police to get a search warrant before tagging an automobile this way.

Amtrak uses OmniTracs on 200 of its trains that run over tracks owned by freight carriers like Burlington Northern. Amtrak can't count on the freight lines to track Amtrak cars. So OmniTracs does that, then forewarns the next stops of delays and can relay data on depleted food stores. Boatracs is OmniTracs' service for the maritime industry.

ProNet of Dallas has given police in 130 cities receivers that can pick up signals from radio transponders as small as a quarter. Jewelry stores hide the transponders under display trays. When smash-and-grabbers make off with a tray, a switch trips and the device emits a radio signal. Using receivers mounted on buildings and in their cars and helicopters, police can track suspects from up to 10 miles away. The transponders are small enough to fit between dollar bills in bags of money given to bank robbers.

Police set out bikes with ProNet's transponders to bait bike thieves. Companies use them to track anything from shipping containers to laptop computers. ProNet rents the devices for $20 to $40 a month.

Services like Teletrac and OmniTracs also monitor shipments of sensitive goods, say, a shipment of fine art or enriched uranium. Using OmniTracs, U.N. troops monitor convoys passing through hazardous parts of the former Yugoslavia.

Now $250 million, the still-embryonic market for radio frequency identification devices will grow by 35% a year over the next five years, says Shannon Worthen, an industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan in Mountain View, Calif. These are often passive radio transponders small as a grain of rice. They consist of microchips attached to small antennae. In a scanner's electromagnetic field, information from the chip is emitted by the antenna and read by toll booths and security gates. Since the energy to power this transfer of data comes from the scanner, the chip can be battery-free and tiny. Competing in this market are wellknown outfits like Motorola and Texas Instruments and a host of smaller, pioneering companies. Destron Fearing of St. Paul, Minn. developed the technology to identify animals by injecting transponders underneath their skin. The company founder invented the device after his prize horse was stolen.

Seven years ago animal-control shelters around the country began inserting silicon IDS in the scruffs of cats and dogs. A number stored on the microchip references a national database of pet owners so that a lost pet can be returned to its home. The chipmaker sells the ID to the animal shelter for about $6 to $8; the pet owner pays the shelter $7.50 to $25.

The chips are also used to track migrating salmon and endangered animals. Tied to shoelaces of runners in the Boston marathon, they record precise finishing times. Beer drinkers in Sweden use personal chip cards to activate taps and dispense themselves drinks.

This stuff scares some people. Belinda Lewis of the Fort Wayne, Ind. animal- control center remembers one outraged customer. "He called it 'The Mark of the Beast.' He said, 'You aren't doing that to my animal."' But he relented after Lewis wouldn't give him the pet without the chip. Other customers accused Lewis of running a government experiment to test microchips for human use.

In fact, humans are already guinea pigs in such a trial. Plastic surgeon Grant Stevens of Marina Del Rey, Calif. has fitted more than a dozen women with soy- filled breast implants as part of a Food & Drug Administration trial. The implants contain the same kind of microchip used in animals. The chips are meant to redress a common problem in breast-implant care: Patients forget important details about their cases. A number on the microchip allows a hospital to retrieve that information from a database.

The potential loss of privacy leaves Dr. Stevens uneasy, he concedes, but there is no better way to insure the accuracy of a person's medical records. He thinks it inevitable that microchips with medical information will become common in humans, possibly inserted under the skin of the upper arm.

Will that mean, say, that a potential boss can find out whether you have a medical problem before he hires you? Possibly. This stuff works both ways.

Now that we implant medical information, why not a security pass? An excited security professional recently called Lewis in Indiana. He wanted subcutaneous microchips to monitor employees' access to buildings. This gets really scary when you think of what a Saddam Hussein could do by ordering his subjects to carry implanted chips on pain of jail or worse.

On the other hand, Teletrac is working on a locator intended for personal safety. One example: helping Alzheimer's sufferers, an idea that was sparked when a son located his elderly father after he drove off in a Teletrac- equipped car.

Several small personal-security companies make transponders to help parents find wandering toddlers (see table, below). They cost around $50 and fit in backpacks or clip onto clothing. Electric bracelets for monitoring criminals have been around for years, and their use is expanding. BI Inc. of Boulder, Colo. makes a bracelet called JurisMonitor, used in 26 states. It monitors whether wife-beaters and stalkers keep the prescribed distance from their targets. Who knows? Maybe some parolees will prefer an implanted chip to a clunky bracelet.

ProNet, the specialist in burglary beacons, plans to sell a device called My 911 to colleges and large employers. People would carry the device when walking to their parked cars or to late-night classes. Pushing an alarm button would summon the campus police or company security to the caller's exact location. The receiving station would also be able to see the victim's name.

You've heard about the satellite telephone systems that will let you make a phone call from anywhere in the world. Those connections can be used in reverse to find someone with a cellular phone. And within two years, at least four separate companies will launch new satellite networks (see table, p. 232). This, too, is a mixed blessing. When and where can a person get away from it all and think?

Nevertheless, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that within five years all cellular phone companies provide the locations of subscribers who call 911. Already 15% to 20% of 911 calls come from cell phone callers, many of whom assume police know where they are. FCC Deputy Bureau Chief Rosalind Allen believes technology has the answer to this problem: "One of the main selling points of wireless phones is safety. There will be substantial competitive pressures to do this."

A new world of tracking lurks in a defense industry contraption known as the unmanned aerial vehicle. These drones can be as big as jumbo jets or as small as paper airplanes. Small ones can patrol an area from only a few hundred feet up, little noticed.

On the drawing board are some vehicles that can fly through an open door, perch inside a building and quietly observe their surroundings. Airborne, they can detect the presence of chemicals, like air pollutants or perhaps, someday, the whiff of hemp. Airplane-size drones can fly halfway around the globe and survey the ground with 12-inch resolution.

Drones have already been used to patrol the U.S.-Mexican border and to monitor miles of power lines. But the commercial market is still in its infancy. Aerospace expert Richard Wagaman of Boeing predicts that sales will reach $2 billion a year by 2005.

Near Bosnia, a few years ago, a group of Serbian soldiers dug up a mass grave of Muslims they had slaughtered. They wanted to burn the evidence of their crime. An unmanned airplane caught the digging on a video camera. Soldiers on the ground shot the camera out of the sky, but not before the video had been transmitted to and stored at the Pentagon. The images helped force the Serbs to the Dayton peace negotiations.

Wagaman says police departments have been testing drones but can't deploy them in large numbers until the air traffic control system is upgraded to keep track of them. That upgrade is likely to come within 10 to 15 years.

The earliest video cameras used to cost $50,000 and weigh more than 100 pounds. Now they cost $100 and weigh mere ounces. They will soon become ubiquitous-appearing on doorways, street corners and drone airplanes.

Like it or not, the world is becoming smaller and smaller and ever more transparent. Your fenced-in yard won't be quite as private as it used to be. But neither will the dark alley near your bank teller machine. Tradeoff, tradeoff, tradeoff.