by Stan Johnson

July 2008

from ProphecyClub Website

 

Prophecy students have long watched the march toward the "Mark".

 

With each passing year we hear of new developments that the world thinks are great, but the prophecy student shakes his head and wonders,

"Why they don't see what they are doing?"

We have been hearing the national ID card is coming, but now the U.S. Department of Transportation is advancing its plans for a national transportation-worker identity card, which will serve as a forerunner of the "trusted-traveler" card for airline passengers.

 

These cards will allow passengers to avoid security screening at checkpoints in airports. This electronic card will use an encoded biometric description of the user to guarantee that the individual using it is the same person on the card.

 

This will naturally shorten the lines at airports for frequent fliers who submit to foreign and FBI background checks. (Trusted Passenger ID Cards

With each new gadget of convenience there is a thread of control. A thread last year, a thread today, two or three threads tomorrow and we wake up in a police state controlling every purchase so that no one can buy or sell without the system.

Wal-Mart, Gillette and Procter & Gamble are joining forces to give momentum to the technology of "talking tags". These tags will contain a computer chip, a small amount of data and a very small antenna that will connect it to the network. Anything with a tag will be able to communicate with networks or the Internet, sending information to electronic devices, appliances, or computers.

 

Your groceries will automatically check themselves out as you push your cart past a scanner. Your prescription bottle will tell you when it needs to be refilled. This technology is called "Auto-ID" and is located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tags are known as Radio Frequency Identification tags, or RFID.

 

In the past, the tags have been too expensive to maintain, but a small, private company in California, called Alien Technology, is working on a large-scale method of production that will greatly reduce the cost.

 

Each tag will sell for just under 7 cents.

Mass production won't start until they can get the cost down to 5 cents. A test is currently going on in Tulsa where several stores have agreed to use these tags throughout the supply chain. Wal-Mart and Pepsi-Cola appear to be the companies involved, but technically, the companies are being kept secret.

(USA Today - 4/11/2002)

The April, 2002 issue of Whistleblower magazine (a monthly publication of WorldNetDaily.Com) is devoted to the topic of implanted chips.

 

A focus of attention has been the release of information about the "VeriChip", manufactured by Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Florida. Initially, the tracking system was advertized as something to be worn as a wristwatch, for example, but after 9/11 a greater need for security was called for.

 

So, the "VeriChip" was born.

What exactly is a "VeriChip?"

 

Readers of this newsletter have heard of RFID for a long time, but now it has taken another step. It is a radio-frequency device injected with a syringe that is about the size of a tip of a ballpoint pen. It contains an ID number and other personal information.

 

Upon injection, it is activated by a scanner and then its signal can be transmitted to a telephone, the Internet, or an FDA-compliant data-storage site.



Applied Digital Solutions used the medical benefits of the chip as its initial thrust of exposure, but it has acquired more ominous ramifications.

 

The prototype of the "VeriChip" is the Digital Angel technology.

 

This chip allows the person equipped with one to be tracked in real time with the Global Positioning System. This information is transmitted wirelessly to the Internet and the person's vital signs, movements and location are collected and stored.

Digital Angel was introduced to the world on Oct. 30, 2000, in New York City. The public and the press were not invited to this event, but the military, the government and private investors were. Secretary of Commerce Norman Mineta was there as was the keynote speaker.

 

CEO Richard Sullivan made these interesting comments:

"I just want to say how delighted we are at Applied Digital Solutions to launch an exciting new partnership with you and the federal government in the important area of digital inclusion."

Does DGS have anyone on their side to help out with the cost of these little critters? To name a few, Schering-Plough (pharmaceuticals), Raytheon-Hughes, and the U.S. Department of Energy?

The highlight of the evening was an actual demonstration of the chip in action as the group watched a guinea pig run the gauntlet through the streets of New York City. They could even tell if the subject was awake or asleep!

 

Rats today, Christians tomorrow?

"Before there may have been resistance, but not anymore. People are getting used to implants. New century, new trend. We will be a hybrid of electronic intelligence and our own soul ," said Chief Technology Officer Dr. Keith Bolton.

Bolton's comments mirror today's complacent majority when he relayed irritation at the protests for the "noisy 20 percent", meaning us Christians that can see the obvious link between this chip and the "Mark of the Beast".

You've heard the saying, "timing is everything". Well, one week after 9/11, Digital Angel made its services available (in the form of the GPS tracking devices) to New York City's fire department and the U.S. Department of Transportation to help with their rescue efforts.

(Whistleblower magazine, Volume 11, No.4, April, 2002)

In the May/June newsletter I reported the Jacobs family wanted to be the first implanted with a microchip. They received their very own VeriChips on the Today Show.

Applied Digital Solutions says it has 4,000 to 5,000 people on their waiting list to get their own VeriChips, and they plan to have a "chipmobile" that will be visiting Florida senior citizen's centers. Take a number and step to the end of the line!

(Los Angeles Times , David Streitfeld)

Andy Rooney is ready to hop on the bandwagon! He said on the 60 Minutes, Feb. 10, 2002 broadcast:

"We need some system for permanently identifying safe people . Most of us are never going to blow anything up and there's got to be something better than one of these photo IDs...I wouldn't mind having something planted permanently in my arm that would identify me."

So safe people are implanted, meaning if you are not safe you won't be implanted.

Who does Applied Digital Solutions think would be good candidates for their chips? Here's a partial list: children and the elderly, law enforcement, prisoners, parolees, all foreigners entering the country, airline workers, nuclear power plant workers, "sensitive industries" employees, diplomats, top corporate executives, soldiers, wilderness hikers, Alzheimer's patients, autistic people, and heart patients. (6)(WorldNetDaily, April 2, 2002, Sherrie Gossett)

 

Now, don't you feel out of place without one? Everybody's doing it!

Julie Foster, from WorldNetDaily, interviewed Dr. Peter Zhou, chief scientist for development of the Digital Angel and president of DigitalAngel.net, Inc who made this statement:

"The purpose of the device is to save your life and improve the quality of life. There's no connection to the Bible. There are different interpretations of the Bible. My interpretation is, anything to improve the quality of life is from God. The Bible says, 'I am the God of living people.' We not only live, we live well."

( Whistleblower magazine, April, 2002, pg. 8)

The military is one group that is the most progressive in their thinking when it comes to the chip.

 

Here is an excerpt from "Air Force 2025":

"The chip creates a computer-generated mental visualization based upon the user's request. The visualization encompasses the individual and allows the user to place himself into the selected battle-space." (He is speaking about a microscopic brain chip.)

 

And, "The chip will give these forces the ability to communicate, visualize, and prosecute military operations."

 

And, "Implanting 'things' in people raises ethical and public relations issues. While these concerns may be founded on today's thinking, in 2025 they may not be as alarming. We already are evolving toward technology implanting. For example, the military currently requires its members to receive mandatory injections of biological organisms (i.e., the flu shot). In the civilian world, people receive mechanical hearts and other organs. Society has come to accept most of these implants as a fact of life. The civilian populace will likely accept implanted microscopic chips that allow military members to defend vital national interests. Further, the U.S. military will continue to be a volunteer force that will freely accept the chip because it is a tool to control technology and not as a tool to control the human."

Now you can go to Kroger's to buy your groceries, and you won't need to bring any cash, checks, or credit cards. With the new SecureTouch-n-Pay technology, all you really need is one finger. This is the new biometric electronic financial transaction processing system. This especially appeals to women because they won't need to bring their purses.

Enrollment requires a driver's license, credit card and a fingerprint scan. This technology was developed by Austin-based Biometric Access Corporation. This will also benefit Kroger because it means fewer forged checks.

(http://www.HoustonChronicle.com Section: Business)

The following information comes directly from the website of a company called TheBEAST.

 

TheBEAST integrates with virtually any business system, permitting the fastest time-to-market rollouts and most accurate financial decision-making ever. It provides a unique combination of analytic applications, real-time trading, order routing, transactional capabilities and market intelligence.

 

It introduces the first real-time data-agnostic, unified platform for market data capture, commingling and delivery.


 





Human Microchip Implants

High-tech Help or Big Brother Surveillance Tool?
by Todd Lewan

The Associated Press
July 22, 2007

from LaCrosseTribune Website

 

CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself — until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms.

The “chipping” of two workers with RFIDs — radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick — was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said.

“To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques,” Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. “There’s a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door.”

Innocuous? Maybe.

But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age.

To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention — a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer’s patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand.

To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else.

Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer’s patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens — until one day, a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged.

Thirty years ago, the first electronic tags were fixed to the ears of cattle, to permit ranchers to track a herd’s reproductive and eating habits. In the 1990s, millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, pets, even racehorses.

Microchips now are fixed to car windshields as toll-paying devices, on “contactless” payment cards (Chase’s “Blink,” or MasterCard’s “PayPass”). They’re embedded in Michelin tires, library books, passports and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a host of individual items at Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

But CityWatcher.com employees weren’t appliances or pets: They were people, made scan-able.

“It was scary that a government contractor that specialized in putting surveillance cameras on city streets was the first to incorporate this technology in the workplace,” says Liz McIntyre, co-author of “Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID.”

Darks, the CityWatcher.com executive, said his employees volunteered to be chipped.

“You would think that we were going around putting chips in people by force,” he told a reporter, “and that’s not the case at all.”

Yet, within days of the company’s announcement, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchip’s implantation in people.

“Ultimately,” says Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in consumer education and RFID technology, “the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, ‘Take a chip or starve.’”

Some critics saw the implants as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age of evil in which humans are forced to take the “Mark of the Beast” on their bodies, to buy or sell anything.

 

Others saw it as a big step toward the creation of a Big-Brother society.

“We’re really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action — some would even claim, our very thoughts — will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated,” says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C.

In design, the tag is simple: A medical-grade glass capsule holds a silicone computer chip, a copper antenna and a “capacitor” that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader.

Implantations are quick, relatively simple procedures. After a local anesthetic is administered, a large-gauge, hypodermic needle injects the chip under the skin on the back of the arm, midway between the elbow and the shoulder.

John Halamka, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, got chipped two years ago, “so that if I was ever in an accident, and arrived unconscious or incoherent at an emergency ward, doctors could identify me and access my medical history quickly.” (A chipped person’s medical profile can be continuously updated, since the information is stored on a data-base accessed via the Internet.)

But it’s also clear to Halamka there are consequences to having an implanted identifier.

“My friends have commented to me that I’m ‘marked’ for life, that I’ve lost my anonymity. And to be honest, I think they’re right.”

Indeed, as microchip proponents and detractors readily agree, Americans’ mistrust of microchips and technologies like RFID runs deep.

 

Many wonder:

  • Do the current chips have global positioning transceivers that would allow the government to pinpoint a person’s exact location, 24-7? (No; the technology doesn’t yet exist.)

  • But could a tech-savvy stalker rig scanners to video cameras and film somebody each time they entered or left the house? (Quite easily, though not cheaply. Currently, readers cost $300 and up.)

  • What’s the average lifespan of a microchip? (About 10-15 years.)

  • What if you get tired of it before then — can it be easily, painlessly removed? (Short answer: No.)

  • How about thieves? Could they make their own readers, aim them at unsuspecting individuals, and surreptitiously pluck people’s IDs out of their arms? (Yes. There’s even a name for it — “spoofing.”)

The company that makes implantable microchips for humans, VeriChip Corp., of Delray Beach, Fla., concedes that’s a problem — even as it markets its radio tag and its portal scanner as imperatives for high-security buildings, such as nuclear power plants.

“To grab information from radio frequency products with a scanning device is not hard to do,” Scott Silverman, the company’s chief executive, says. However, “the chip itself only contains a unique, 16-digit identification number. The relevant information is stored on a database.”

VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans.

The company’s present push: tagging of “high-risk” patients — diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer’s disease.

In an emergency, hospital staff could wave a reader over a patient’s arm, get an ID number, and then, via the Internet, enter a company database and pull up the person’s identity and medical history.

To doctors, a “starter kit” — complete with 10 hypodermic syringes, 10 VeriChips and a reader — costs $1,400. To patients, a microchip implant means a $200, out-of-pocket expense to their physician. Presently, chip implants aren’t covered by insurance companies, Medicare or Medicaid.

For almost two years, the company has been offering hospitals free scanners, but acceptance has been limited. According to the company, 515 hospitals have pledged to take part in the VeriMed network, yet only 100 have actually been equipped and trained to use the system.

Some wonder why they should abandon noninvasive tags such as MedicAlert, a low-tech bracelet that warns paramedics if patients have serious allergies or a chronic medical condition.

“Having these things under your skin instead of in your back pocket — it’s just not clear to me why it’s worth the inconvenience,” says Westhues.

Silverman responds that an implanted chip is “guaranteed to be with you. It’s not a medical arm bracelet that you can take off if you don’t like the way it looks ... ”

In fact, microchips can be removed from the body — but it’s not like removing a splinter.

The capsules can migrate around the body or bury themselves deep in the arm. When that happens, a sensor X-ray and monitors are needed to locate the chip, and a plastic surgeon must cut away scar tissue that forms around the chip.

The relative permanence is a big reason why Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is suspicious about the motives of the company, which charges $20 a year for customers to keep on its database a record of blood type, allergies, medications, driver’s license data and living-will directives. For $80 a year, it will keep an individual’s full medical history.

What’s been said on chip implants

Some public statements on the implantation of radio frequency identification devices in people:

“President (Alvaro) Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted into their bodies before they are permitted to enter the United States to work on a seasonal basis. I doubted whether the implantation of microchips would be effective, since the immigrant worker might be able to remove them.”

— Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., April 26, 2006, after returning from an official visit to Colombia.

“You can also do it to replace dog tags with the United States armed forces.”

— Tommy Thompson, former Secretary of Health and Human Services and a Republican presidential candidate, July 11, 2005.

“Can a microscopic tag be implanted in a person’s body to track his every movement? There’s actual discussion about that. You will rule on that — mark my words — before your tenure is over.”

— Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., to John Roberts during Supreme Court confirmation hearings Sept. 12, 2005.

“We need some system for permanently identifying safe people. Most of us are never going to blow anything up and there’s got to be something better than one of these photo IDs ... I wouldn’t mind having something planted permanently in my arm that would identify me.”

— Andy Rooney, CBS-TV commentator, on the news program “60 Minutes,” Feb. 10, 2002.

“It’s entirely possible to imagine, down the road, that a stalking victim might have a chip implanted for health reasons, and then be monitored, day and night, by an abuser who hides a reader in the house, or at the door of the house.”

— Cindy Southworth, director of technology at the National Network to End Domestic Violence in Washington, D.C., June 7, 2007.

“Once a microchip is implanted in a human being, it’s no longer just a privacy issue — it’s a human rights matter.”

— Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., June 5, 2007.