Researchers in Taiwan this week advocated for the implanting of Radio Frequency Identifiction microchips into people so that survivors could be more readily located during disaster response efforts.

   These chips are the same ones used to tag pets in the back of their necks, so that local animal shelters can reunite them with their owners when they become lost.

   These are the chips sewn into clothes at the chain stores to track people who try to steal items from their retail outlets.

  These are the same chips built into credit cards for easy-swipe scanners (not the old magnetic strip, but the new easy pass ones coming into vogue today).

   The point is that these chips are pervasive and becoming increasingly common in our daily lives. They are also innocuous and hard to spot. Whether inside your passport, on your electronic bridge pass, in your cell phone, under the hood of your I-Pod, under the hood of your car, on your key chain or otherwise, they are everywhere. They track our movements whether we want them to or not.

   One tech firms in California is already implanting RFID chips into employees' forearms in order to provide them with secured access into their facilities.

   Although techology may offer a solution for rare emergency situations, the loss of privacy on a day to day basis is more likely cause for general consternation which will override the willingness of most people to voluntarily engage in such a program. Screams from feel-good hippies that this “degrades” the human condition making us all mere animals will obfuscate the real issues surrounding the technology. Others will raise health concerns. It will be amusing when the first tatooed, pierced, body-modified teen is interviewed about resisting the dangerous, cancer-causing, “animal tags” being forced upon them by his school principle, Mr. Orwell. Yep, it's info-tainment, but at least it's interesting.