Okay, it seems I was right. Whatever Iowa congressional hopeful Pat Bertroche thinks, you wouldn’t be able to track illegal immigrants if you actually followed through on the idea of forcibly implanting them with microchips. As I suggested, the kind of microchips we’re talking about here aren’t transponders. They’re passive beacons. You have to run a decoder gizmo over them to get any info from them. In other words, it’s not going to turn into an illegal immigrant LoJack system — a Bertroche fantasy simultaneously comical and grotesque.
TPM Reader UF gives us some background on how these gizmos actually work …
I imagine you’ve gotten several responses to your query on chipping animals since you posted it hours and hours ago, but I’ll throw in my 2 cents from a technical perspective, cause I’m a busibody.
You are correct that the “chip” implanted in dogs and cats are read by an external device, but the rest of the time they are inert. They contain a RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tag that uses the transmitted power from an interrogator (the scanning device) to power its systems – such things are actually becoming quite ubiquitous, for instance many modern cars read an RFID tag implanted in the key and if it doesn’t match the car won’t start.
RFID has been used for years everywhere, for instance if you’ve ever seen pictures of cattle close up, you might notice they often have little tags riveted to their ears – that’s used for tracking any number of things the individual animal might do (drink, eat, go in the barn, whatever), with the only caveat that you need an interrogator close by to actually read the thing (by close I mean a few meters at the most). Libraries tag books with them, to speed up the check out process and maintain stack inventory. Retail uses them to track product from the loading dock up, WalMart most famously so (as a side note, RFID is not quite the same as the Anti-theft tags, though RFID can be used that way – traditional anti-theft tags have no brains to them, they set off the alarm at the gate for electro-magnetic reasons).
For some light reading, you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about passive RFID systems with this little online course I wrote about RFID a few years ago for a site that provides continuing education credits for Professional Engineers. The first two paragraphs are embarrassingly poor, but it gets better beyond that.
Bottom line, anything that could be tracked remotely and secretly that is small enough to be implanted in a person (or dog) will run out of battery power in very short order (hence the attractiveness of passive transmission, despite its distance limitations), at least until such a time that there are govt mandated interrogators every 5 feet everywhere we might go. Personally, I would prefer the expense of everyone getting a hover car, but I suppose Dr.Bertroche guesses complete undocumented alien protection would require the sacrifice.
