The American Civil Liberties Union has urged Virginia not to place RFID chips in driver’s licenses.

“This proposal would allow anyone to set up an RFID reader to capture the identities and personal information of every person who comes within range,” said Kent Willis, Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia. “FBI agents, for example, could sweep up the identities of everyone at a political meeting, protest march, gun show, or Islamic prayer service.”

Via RFID News.

Applied Digital, maker of the implantable VeriChip for humans, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the practice of injecting humans with tracking devices for medical purposes. The devices should be used for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other conditions requiring complex treatment.

Using a special scanner, hospital staff would fetch data from the chips, such as the patient’s identity, blood type and details of their condition, in order to speed treatment.

As no hospitals have placed orders for the chips, the company is planning to give away scanners, which cost $650 a piece, to 200 trauma centers around the country to jump-start the market.

Via bTang reBlog < Smartmobs < ZDNet.

An influential group of Pentagon advisers, the Defense Science Board, is convinced that the only way to win the war on terror is to track everyone, and everything, that moves.

The Pentagon urgently needs a massive effort to develop tools to track individuals, items and activities in ways that exist today only in science fiction, a high-level advisory panel recently told U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Technologies that can identify people by unique physical characteristics — fingerprint, voice, odor, gait or even pattern of iris — must be merged with new means of “tagging” so that U.S. forces can find enemies who escape into a crowd or slip into a labyrinthine slum.

“Cost is not the issue; failure in the global war on terrorism is the real question.”

Via Defense Tech < ISR Journal.