There's a Digital Angel inYour Shoulder

At a secret soirée held sometime last month at an undisclosed New York City location, an invitation-only crowd witnessed the unveiling of a miraculous new technology. As with the cultural brouhaha over breast augmentation, it may further underscore Americans’ ambivalent attitudes towards implants. Applied Digital Solutions’ “Digital Angel” illustrates what kind of offspring may ensue when the telecommunications and biotech fields commingle.

The crux of Digital Angel technology is a miniature sensory device — replete with an eentsy-weentsy antenna — that can wirelessly transmit and receive data and be located by Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. When it’s implanted in or closely bonded to a subject, the microchip’s biosensors can be used to track the whereabouts of people and objects; its purported main use, though, is to monitor the medical condition of at-risk patients.

Touted on its Web site as “technology that cares,” Digital Angel appears to be carving out an unprecedented market niche; a place where other tech companies may not fear to tread, but what about the average American? A not-so-angelic host of controversial ramifications, ones related to civil liberty issues in particular, will rear their dubious halos to skeptical adults. Can this device be used by the federal government to track the movements of, say, political dissidents? Or emissaries from foreign governments? Or the legal owners of firearms? In the corporate arena, will this chip somehow be adapted for the purposes of monitoring employees? Can existing legal statutes adequately cover these and other concerns? Time will tell whether U.S. citizens greet this Angel with cries of “Hallelujah” or bitter denunciations and prophecies of black helicopters. Then again, people may just be too preoccupied with Super Bowl predictions to notice.