Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/30/mexican_verichip_hype/print.html>

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT


Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype
By Thomas C Greene (thomas.greene at theregister.co.uk)
Published Tuesday 30th November 2004 18:00 GMT

Reports that 160 Mexican officials have had RFID chips implanted within
their flesh in some bizarre "security" scheme have been exaggerated,
Anti-RFID outfit CASPIAN (http://www.nocards.org/) (Consumers Against
Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) says.

"Our concern is that dozens of news outlets have repeated the inflated
number, which has reached the level of an urban legend," CASPIAN Director
Katherine Albrecht said in a recent press release.


"I myself have repeated the erroneous figure in several media interviews,
and I want to set the record straight," she added.

The true number of Mexico's new robo-crats, based on a transcript
(http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/mexican-translation.html) from a
Televisa Mexican interview, is only 18, CASPIAN says.

In a 19 July, 2004 press release, Albrecht made a clear mention of the
imaginary 160:

"Promoting implanted RFID devices as a security measure is downright
'loco,'" says Katherine Albrecht. "Advertising you've got a chip in your
arm that opens important doors is an invitation to kidnapping and
mutilation."

That's Albrecht's response to the announcement by Mexican Attorney General
Rafael Macedo de la Concha that he and 160 other Mexican officials were
implanted with Verichip RFID devices.

We wondered how the inflated figure got circulating in the first place. The
earliest mention in English that we could find on the Web, following a
not-terribly-aggressive search, comes from a blog called igargoyle
(http://igargoyle.com/archives/000448.html) on 13 July 2004. This is
followed, with more details, by the Associated Press
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5439055/), The Guardian
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1260858,00.html), and
The Register
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/14/mexicans_get_chipped/), each on 14
July.

CASPIAN, weighing in several days later, is clearly not to blame for the
hype. And now the outfit has learned that classic lesson about believing
what one reads in the papers.

But who is to blame? Well, there is a 13 July item in Spanish
(http://www.el-universal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia_busqueda.html?id_nota=113215&tabla=nacion_h)
that seems to have words in it that relate to the RFID story, along with
the number 160; but this is unlikely to be the original source. There is
also (we believe) a brief mention
(http://presidencia.gob.mx/buenasnoticias/index.php?contenido=8614&pagina=28)
in a 13 July press release on what we think is the Mexican President's
official Web site.

The thirteenth seems to be when the story broke in Mexico, and the source
seems to be Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha himself, although
we could not find a place where he is directly quoted as saying that 160
employees would be chipped. Reporters have offered the number in the
context of interviewing him, which suggests that he's the source, but there
are no specific, direct quotes that we could find. Perhaps, like many
senior bureaucrats, he had no idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps a companion press release contained the bogus number, or perhaps
the Spanish words for 18 and 160 sound alike, as fifteen and fifty do in
English.

In any case, we're pleased to have cleared this up. .


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'