HHS announces program to implant RFID tags in homeless [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[This is a joke... I hope! --Declan]

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Subject: latest HHS outrage... please circulate widely! (REMOVEEMAIL)
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 09:26:25 -0500
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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.


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