It started with animals and now some human beings are opting to allow tracking devices to be placed in their bodies. In a move that is taken right out of the writings of P.K. Dick or Isaac Asimov, people are now willingly offering up themselves as candidates for satellite tracking.
In high kidnap-prone areas like Mexico and certain regions of the Middle East, the affluent are lining up to have computer chips inserted in undisclosed locations of their bodies under the skin so that should they or their children become the victim of a kidnapping officials can pinpoint their location quickly via satellite monitoring.
The U.S. military has been considering using this same techology on soldiers deployed to high-risk areas such as Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Some even believe the program is already being used by the Army and Marines, but this has never been proven or admitted to by the Pentagon.
Proponents of the technology believe using this modern-day ability, no matter how privacy invasive it appears, is a good idea in countries like Mexico where the kidnapping rate is as high as 40 percent of the population, a staggering sum when one considers that millions of people live in Mexico City alone and is known as the haven of kidnappers. However, those opposed to such invasion of privacy feel that this kind of tracking won’t help in the majority of Mexican cases since the victims are generally taken only long enough to allow them to remove money via an ATM and give it to their abductors who then let them go — a transaction that can take less than an hour and usually goes unreported.
The other country high on the kidnapping list after Mexico is Columbia, South America where most of these snatches of people are drug-cartel related so it is unlikely many there will volunteer for implantation of the tracking devices. Third on the list is Iraq, then the United States.
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