Here's Lookin' at You

Company officials were forthcoming about their plans for the VeriChip, but as New Times asked about the lawsuits and SEC investigations, Applied Digital officials no longer returned phone calls or e-mails.

At company headquarters in the Morgan Stanley building in Delray Beach, Silverman runs a scanner over his own forearm. The device displays a number that identifies Silverman and the implanted chip hidden in the fatty tissue near his triceps. A dozen of the company's 25 employees have had the chips installed, and scanners built into doorways in the offices can prevent access to those without the chips. Silverman says the scanners are not operative but could be if heightened security were suddenly necessary. He predicts that some day the chips may be used as identification for credit card purchases, for medical information, and for government employees, including as a way for prisons to track the movement of guards.

"It'll be a long time before this chip is the only means of accessing information," concedes Silverman, wearing a jet-black suit and an unbuttoned white dress shirt. "We're talking maybe ten or 15 years, and then it will be in many people."

Silverman says the company maintains a policy that the chips should be installed only voluntarily. Applied Digital employees are not required to undergo the procedure, which involves what looks like a foot-long hypodermic needle. Even spokeswoman Fulcher admits she has not had a chip installed. "Honestly, I wanted to wait for the FDA approval," she says, "and now that we have it, I might get it in the next round of employee chipping."

Privacy advocates fear Silverman's vision of a cybernetically monitored future. Katherine Albrecht is editor and founder of Spychips.com, a website dedicated to keeping microchips out of people, and the first to discover that only 18 employees at the Mexican Attorney General's Office received the chips. Albrecht predicts that the company will begin marketing the chip as a voluntary tool, then move to get the government to force it on people. "Their business model is trying to coerce governments here and overseas to mandate the chips," Albrecht says. "It's only a matter of time before somebody suggests everyone gets these chips. Can you imagine what somebody like Hitler would have done with this kind of technology?"

Albrecht says it isn't hard to see what a microchip future would look like. Something similar has already begun at Bammel Elementary School in Spring, Texas. There, students were required for the first time this fall to keep with them ID cards equipped with radio-controlled devices that monitor their locations. School officials and police can keep track of each time a student gets off a bus or enters a school. Eventually, the community's entire 28,000-student population is expected to begin carrying the devices. Albrecht fears that the progression will be to install chips inside children, then inside workers at large companies. Then comes a future in which anyone can be tracked anywhere, thanks to a Delray company with a checkered past.