Good old technology. Ever creating havoc and bringing order all willy-nilly and all at once. Technology continues to present opportunities and challenges in completely unforeseen ways. For example, civil liberties concerns have been raised about aspects of what is called “information technology,” right from the beginning of what I call the “information age.” The impacts of information technologies have been compared to the invention of the printing press, and comparisons made in the parallel burst of information dissemination. That is not where the biggest potential technological “civil liberties” problems lie, however — nor the potential advancements.

The lowly barcode, reigning champion of asset tracking, remains ubiquitous. The “son of barcode” has been quietly growing in the background however, and has reared its head in some very surprising ways.

For several years products have had “electronic tags” that blab to store gendarmes when an enterprising person decides to partake of a five-finger discount. Upstanding citizens that actually pay for the products that they convey out the door avoid embarrassment and visits to the gray-bar hotel. The small tags are deactivated at checkout and rendered “harmless.” It does not take a stretch of genius to see that such tags easily could replace the optical scan system employed by barcode readers. Nor does it take a brain surgeon to figure out that these tiny tattle-tales will find other, perhaps more sinister uses.

Well, sure enough, up they pop. In recent years tiny, implantable chips have been used to “tag” pets so they could be identified and even tracked if they went missing. In the past year there have been instances where parents have had ID chips implanted in their children. And recently the British Government has announced a test project to embed chips in British passports in an effort to stymie identity theft and forgery.

Now comes RFID, the industry. Or in the immortal words of whoever-it-was that said it, “the Future is Now!”

Radio Frequency Identification (or RFID) has achieved the status of having magazines devoted to the subject, numerous scholarly articles in trade journals, and “activists” opposed to the technique. Yep. It’s an industry! — and a fairly established one at that. Tremendous strides are being made in the capabilities of the RFID components and therein lies the rub.

The especially sticky part comes in with “what comes next?” The devices can be read from up to 30 feet away with current versions. Think about it. Simply by walking in close proximity to a sensor, any embedded chip could be read and potentially used to track you, if not continuously, then as you pass through invisible “checkpoints.” Now consider if the range is extended (as it surely will be in a very short period of time) and assume that the range is not measured in feet, but in hundreds or even thousands of yards. What was science fiction 10 or 20 years ago is fact today (www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65243,00.html).

“Some federal and state government officials want to make state driver’s licenses harder to counterfeit or steal, by adding computer chips that emit a radio signal bearing a license holder’s unique, personal information.”

Virginia state legislators will hear testimony about how radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags may prevent identity fraud and help thwart terrorists using falsified documents from traveling freely about the country.

An example of RFID is of drivers with E-ZPass tags on their windshields. The tags permit the holder to drive through appropriately equipped highway toll booths without stopping. RFID tags, which respond to signals sent out by reader devices, achieve working ranges up to 30 feet.

While I am suspicious of chicken-little sky-is-falling “activists” that seem to crop up to whine about every issue under the sun, in this case there is cause for concern and close scrutiny. I am neither a “never-think-anything-bad-about-our-dedicated-public-servants” Pollyanna, nor am I an “I-hate-all-governments” anarchist. There is very real potential for uncountable very-good-things to come out of RFID technologies. As with all tools, there are an equal number of potential very-bad-things looming in the shadows. We are going to be “living in interesting times,” and no doubt about it.

I look forward to it.