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American Morning

Talk with Member of Applied Digital Solutions and Member of Electronic Frontier Foundation

Aired January 10, 2002 - 07:50   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Keith Bolton of Applied Digital Solutions, the company that makes the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) chip and from San Francisco Attorney Lee Tien with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who worries this technology could be abused.

Keith, let me start off with you. The FDA has not approved this technology, but if it does, how could this chip be used now?

KEITH BOLTON, APPLIED DIGITAL SOLUTIONS: Anderson, it is an advanced identification technology and it could be used in the event of an emergency to where if you had a pacemaker embedded in your body and you couldn't either speak or you were in shock, your body could be scanned and vital information could be portrayed instantly and that information could probably perhaps really save your life in seconds.

COOPER: Lee, what - it sounds good. What's wrong with that?

LEE TIEN, ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FDN.: Well you know there are clearly benefits to having this kind of technology, but there are also significant privacy implications, because on the one hand you've got very sensitive medical information and who knows who can access it other than the company - the readers. I'm not sure how secure this information is. And you've got the I.D. aspect of the chip or the location aspect of the chip. This is something that permit, you know, 24/7 tracking of people who are wearing it, and you know do we really know what the chip does? Do we have control over the chip? If I have this chip in me, can I turn it off? Do I know when I'm being scanned? There are all sorts of privacy issues here.

COOPER: Keith, let me ask you about that. How do we know that the government or someone else wouldn't use this technology against us?

BOLTON: Well Anderson, this technology lies - the chip itself lies dormant within the body, and it can only be read with a proprietary patented scanner. The chip is proprietarily patented and so is the scanner, so it requires someone actually having the scanner, and the scanner can only read from an area of somewhere between two inches to four feet from the site of the chip itself.

COOPER: All right, it is a brave new world. Keith Bolton and Lee Tien, thanks very much for joining us this morning. We'll be right back. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you.

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