FDA Approves Implantable Microchips

phrontist writes: "Wired is running a story about the Federal Drug Administration ruling that an 'implantable microchip used for ID purposes is not a regulated device, paving the way for the chip's immediate sale in the United States.' Spooky."

Comments

Can't Decide

[squaretorus]

Wether it would be better to have this thing implanted in my little finger - so making it EASY to steal if anyone ever decides to steal my ID.

OR. To implant it right deep in my guts as a deterent. Or maybe in the roof of my mouth!

Wouldn't fancy losing my little finger - its handy when a little drunk for proclaiming my evilness. But I enjoy my mouth aswell...

But hey - so long as I dont run for president or anything...

Potentially useful, though the legality will be in

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, and potentially useful device, used in the right fashion, but I wonder how long it will take the overly litigious mood in the US to bring about legislation governing the circumstances under which these are to be implanted.
It strikes me that certain bodies might like to have these implanted in the hospital when you're born, so that you may be IDed through your entire life.
Is it feasible that government could prevent people from taking certain types of high-security job without first having one of these implants?

On a more personal note, I think i woul be interesting to mandatorily implant these in every citizen, and use this as the first step towards ultimate accountability. I realise privacy advocates may find this a shocking and unpalatable notion (I too donate to EFF every year) but I think this could be a step in the right direction, provided that the first institutions to be fitted with reader devices are government departments. This would provide a unique method of ensuring accountability:Rather than the current governmental trend, where people who perform poorly or make grave an incompetent blunders are protected from public reaction by suppressing the detalis of the incident, we could have full, immediat public disclosure of all the particulars of any and every little indiscretion.

This might be useful in reversing the embarassing (to anyone who knows) trend towards promotion of idiots with no chance of succeeding in the real world to positions where they can do maximum damage.

So who'll market one to hold your medical data?

[jerde]

The concept here is that all ER technicians will have the simple scanning device that will pull important medical data off the chip.

If you're unconscious, and the ER tech can just scan off you that you're diabetic and allergic to penicillin, that's a Good Thing.

Of course, conspiracy theorists say that every time you have surgery, the Government is implanting these in us without our knolwedge, and using it to track us. Oooooh!

Give me a break.

- Peter

Re:So who'll market one to hold your medical data?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how often do EMT's and hospital personnel check for MedicAlert bracelets? I assure you, it's way less than 100% of the time. What makes you think they'll check for the chip with any greater regularity?

just an id number

[Dr. Tom]

I had an ID number engraved on my bicycle.

It was stolen anyway.

As near as I can tell, this thing just contains a number which can be read by any scanner you pass. So it's useless as a secure ID because anyone can get your code by scanning you and then using a programmable chip that sends out that code.

They don't say how large the number is. Presumably it's a cryptographically strong random number chosen at manuf. time, but don't bet that the number isn't chosen via rand() % 10000000, either.

It might be useful as a toy to open doors and stuff for you, but a face recognition system will do that without invasive surgery.

Having a Lowjack or something like that might be cool if I thought I could be stolen, but I doubt you can fit a GPS + cell phone unit into a grain of rice. Though if I were going to implant something large it'd be a programmable telephone. Even so I think a StarTrek communicator would be better, and more fashionable. Really, who's gonna get "chipped" because they "think it's cool" to be treated like a herd animal? A tattoo is way cooler.

Here's a tip...

[evilviper]

Here's a tip for all those who dare to make these chips...

Don't EVER even THINK about implanting these in the forehead or right hand. You're just ASKING for trouble. Besides, there are many other places that you could implant such a chip that wouldn't raise the ire of the fanatics out there.

And as soon as there's even a hint that this is going to be mandatory.... I'm moving to the moon.

First of all...

[Dr. Sp0ng]

It's "Food and Drug Administration," not "Federal Drug Administration."

Anyway, I don't think that implantable ID chips are a good idea by any stretch of the imagination, but to those of you who say "it just transmits a number, therefore it would be easy to clone somebody's chip," it would be possible to make a (much more) secure chip that accomplishes the same thing. Think public key crypto; if you want to check if this chip belongs to person X, you send the chip a bit of data, it signs it with a private key and only sends out the signed data, not the key itself. Then you check it against person X's public key. It would work on the same principle as digital signatures.

Of course, it would have to have a large enough key that it would be infeasible to brute force any time in the forseeable future (barring quantum computing), and it would have to be based on a proven and time-tested encryption algorithm.

That said, you won't catch anybody sticking one of these fucking things in me.

Might this be a good thing?

[AntiNorm]

Without regulations on it, would it not be (significantly) more difficult for them to make it mandatory? Even if they were only making them mandatory for a select group of individuals, e.g. sex offenders, the fact that they specifically refuse to regulate them seems to indicate that they just don't want to have to mess with them.

Re:Might this be a good thing?

[Rogerborg]

• Without regulations on it, would it not be (significantly) more difficult for them to make it mandatory?

Hardly. Who exactly is going to object if (for example) judicial decides to start implanting these in offenders? It's on the FDA's "not our problem" list, so they won't block it.

Want to build a reader???

[Muad'Dave]

Here's a link to a great 2MB PDF on the subject. At 125kHz, it's really simple to recover the data. Note that antennas at that frequency are pretty large, and could, say, be wrapped around the trim of a doorway, or around the opening in the floor for a staircase, etc... you'd never know who was reading your key. Match a doorway reader with a digital camera, and poof! You've got an automatic ID database generator!