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from here on January 24, 2009
http://www.friendsofliberty.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1633
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Program to implant RFID tags in homeless
April 03, 2004
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services said Thursday that it was about to begin testing a new
technology designed to help more closely monitor and assist the nation's
homeless population.
Under the pilot program, which grew out of a series of policy academies held in
the last two years, homeless people in participating cities will be implanted
with mandatory Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that social workers
and police can use track their movements.
The RFID technology was developed by HHS' Health Resources and Services
Administration (HRSA) in partnership with five states, including California and
New York. "This is a rare opportunity to use advanced technology to meet
society's dual objectives of better serving our homeless population while making
our cities safer," HRSA Administrator Betty James Duke said...
The miniscule RFID tags are no larger than a matchstick and will be implanted
subdermally, meaning under the skin. Data from RFID tracking stations mounted on
telephone poles will be transmitted to police and social service workers, who
will use custom Windows NT software to track movements of the homeless in real
time.
In what has become a chronic social problem, people living in shelters and on
the streets do not seek adequate medical care and frequently contribute to the
rising crime rate in major cities. Supporters of subdermal RFID tracking say the
technology will discourage implanted homeless men and women from committing
crimes, while making it easier for government workers to provide social services
such as delivering food and medicine.
Duke called the RFID tagging pilot program "a high-tech, minimally-intrusive way
for the government to lift our citizens away from the twin perils of poverty and
crime." Participating cities include New York City, San Francisco, Washington,
and Bethlehem, Penn.
Participating states will receive grants of $14 million to $58 million from the
federal Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness
(PATH) program, which was created under the McKinney Act to fund support
services for the homeless. A second phase of the project, scheduled to be
completed in early 2005, will wirelessly transmit live information on the
locations of homeless people to handheld computers running the Windows CE
operating system.
A spokesman for the National Coalition for the Homeless, which estimates that
there are between 2.3 million and 3.5 million people experiencing homelessness
nationwide, said the pilot program could be easily abused.
"We have expressed our tentative support for the idea to HRSA, but only if it
includes privacy safeguards," the spokesman said. "So far it's unclear whether
those safeguards will actually be in place by roll-out."
Chris Hoofnagle, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
said the mandatory RFID program would be vulnerable to a legal challenge. "It is
a glaring violation of the Tenth Amendment, which says that powers not awarded
to the government are reserved to the people, and homeless people have just as
many Tenth Amendment rights as everyone else," said Hoofnagle, who is speaking
about homeless privacy at this month's Computers Freedom and Privacy conference
in Berkeley, Calif.
While HRSA's program appears to be the first to forcibly implant humans with
RFID tags, the technology is becoming more widely adopted as retailers use it to
track goods. Wal-Mart Stores said last year that it will require its top 100
suppliers to place RFID tags on shipping crates and pallets by January 2005.
end
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