Tell Me That This is a Spoof… Please…

Brian Brady in The Independent:

Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.

Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.

But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.

Really? Two things – firstly a little more in the article itself:

The tags, labelled “spychips” by privacy campaigners, are already used around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport luggage, but there is no record of the technology being used to monitor offenders in the community. The chips are also being considered as a method of helping to keep order within prisons.

In the tagline to the piece, the Indy refers to “satellite technology”. The chips used in animals are machine readable from a few feet at the most. Nothing to do with satellites. So where does Brady gets that from? Ah…

A senior Ministry of Justice official last night confirmed that the department hoped to go even further, by extending the geographical range of the internal chips through a link-up with satellite-tracking similar to the system used to trace stolen vehicles. “All the options are on the table, and this is one we would like to pursue,” the source added.

Hmmm. I can only assume that this “senior official” doesn’t understand the technology. RFID is not the same thing as a tracking device – so which is it?

The move is in line with a proposal from Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), that electronic chips should be surgically implanted into convicted paedophiles and sex offenders in order to track them more easily. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is seen as the favoured method of monitoring such offenders to prevent them going near “forbidden” zones such as primary schools.

Ken Jones is as ignorant as the “senior official”, then. RFID doesn’t work with global positioning – it isn’t powerful enough – and that isn’t how GPS works. GPS tells the user where he is using a receiver, not a transmitter. Also, note how the good old friendly neighbourhood paedophile is wheeled out like the regular little bogeyman to make this dreadful idea palatable to a credulous readership. That it is impracticable doesn’t negate the sheer awfulness of the mindset behind it. Paedophiles today – you and I tomorrow.

We have wanted to take advantage of this technology for several years, because it seems a sensible solution to the problems we are facing in this area,” a senior minister said last night. “We have looked at it and gone back to it and worried about the practicalities and the ethics, but when you look at the challenges facing the criminal justice system, it’s time has come.

Clearly Ken Jones uses a different dictionary to the rest of us – nowhere can I find a definition of “sensible” that encompasses the use given here. The man is an arrant totalitarian. If he did, indeed, worry briefly (and it must have been a nanosecond or two) at any point about the ethics, then he would have rejected it out of hand.

A note of common sense is injected into the discussion by Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers

This is the sort of daft idea that comes up from the department every now and then, but tagging people in the same way we tag our pets cannot be the way ahead. Treating people like pieces of meat does not seem to represent an improvement in the system to me.

Indeed – it is just the sort of sci-fi bollocks that government departments come up with because they do not understand the technology and therefore, its limitations. Also, surgically injecting a chip is a world away from a removable bracelet that comes off at the end of the sentence. That some come off before that is a failure of the departments concerned, so they should be fixing their own incompetence before seeking an impracticable technological solution to a problem that they have largely created themselves.

The second point that occurred to me, is this; I cannot find any other reference to this story. Try googling it and all the stories feed right back to the Indy. Now, is it me, or is that a little odd?