Hello, Lindy -

The Digital Angel is vaporware - and $300 a pop + $240 a year for the contract. The article about the subcutaneous chip made it prety clear (to me, anyway) that it's passive and must be scanned at close range - kind of like your water meter, or the ID card I need to get into the Accuweather building.

Somehow in the brief length of this thread, those unlike devices have been merged in the imagination into a full-service, sub-Q tattletale. Unless I am drestically underestimating the state of covert electronics (as opposed to commercialy availalble products), there are size constraints built into the physics of GPS and cell-phone technologies that prevent that kind of item from being implantable without detection: primarily, the power source and the antenna.

Couple that with a story I heard on NPR the other day about the military giving up some of their reserved RF bandwidth to acomodate the increased demand for commercial use. Now consider how unsecure digital encryption can be, when mathematical journal papers have been yanked before publication for publishing decryption keys discovered by brute-force analysis - by plain old, innocent academics, no less, not organized criminals or untrustworthy nations. I won't even get into the subject of remote control... I'll take your use of the word "automaton" in its figurative sense: "behavior controlled by threat of punishment", such as the world of Airstrip One.

Mind you, I wouldn't disagree for an instant about the dangerous insidious nature of such a device, if it could exist. I chuckle to myself at the irony of Fundie Xtians calling it "the mark of the Beast", since they seem to be the one group in American society most likely to support, if not demand, control of behavior.

Sure hope I'm right about the feasibility issue!

E'