The Seattle Times
written by Nick Miroff, The Washington Post
August 22, 2011
QUERÉTARO, Mexico — Of all the strange circumstances surrounding the violent abduction last year of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, the Mexican power broker and former presidential candidate known here as "Boss Diego," perhaps nothing was weirder than the mysterious tracking chip the kidnappers allegedly cut from his body.
Lurid Mexican media accounts reported that an armed gang invaded Fernandez' home, sliced open his arm with a pair of scissors and extracted a satellite-enabled tracking device.
Fernandez was freed seven months later with little explanation, but the gruesome details of his crude surgery have not dissuaded thousands of worried Mexicans from seeking out similar satellite and radio-frequency tracking products — including scientifically dubious chip implants — as abductions in the country soar.
According to a recent Mexican congressional report, kidnappings have jumped 317 percent in the past five years. Under-the-skin devices such as the one allegedly carved out of Boss Diego are selling here for thousands of dollars on the promise that they can help rescuers track down kidnapping victims. Xega, the Mexican company that sells the chips and performs the implants, says its sales have increased 40 percent in the past two years.
For $2,000 upfront and annual fees of $2,000, the company provides clients with a subdermal radio-frequency identification chip (RFID), essentially a small antenna in a tiny glass tube. The chip, inserted into the fatty tissue of the arm between the shoulder and elbow, is less than half an inch long and about as wide as a strand of boiled spaghetti.
The chip relays a signal to an external GPS unit the size of a cellphone, Kuri said, but if the owner is stripped of the GPS device in the event of an abduction, Xega can still track down its clients by sending radio signals to the implant. It says it has helped rescue 178 clients in the past decade.
But RFID researchers and engineers in the United States call it a sham. Any device that could communicate with satellites or even the local cellular network would need a battery and sizable antenna, like a cellphone, they say.
The development of an RFID human implant that could work as a tracking device remains far off, said Justin Patton, managing director of the University of Arkansas RFID Research Center, which specializes in product and merchandise tracking for retail companies such as Wal-Mart.
"There's no way in the world something that size can communicate with a satellite," Patton said. Water is a major barrier for radio frequency, he added, and because the human body is mostly made up of water, it would dull the signal, as would metal, concrete and other solid materials.
Xega executives acknowledged that a Xega implant would be essentially useless unless the client carried the GPS-enabled transmitter.
Several other Mexican companies also sell GPS-enabled tracking units with panic buttons, relying on more-proven forms of technology. The transmitters, smaller than a cellphone, can fit on a key chain, and they work by communicating with cellular networks.
No comments:
Post a Comment