| by LPJ • Tuesday April
06, 2004 at 08:55 PM WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services said Thursday that it was about to begin testing a new technology
designed to help more closely monitor and assist the nation's homeless population.Under
the pilot program, which grew out of a series of policy academies held in the
last two years, homeless people in participating cities will be implanted with
mandatory Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that social workers and police
can use track their movements. The RFID technology was developed by HHS'
Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in partnership with five states,
including California and New York. "This is a rare opportunity to use advanced
technology to meet society's dual objectives of better serving our homeless population
while making our cities safer," HRSA Administrator Betty James Duke said. The
miniscule RFID tags are no larger than a matchstick and will be implanted subdermally,
meaning under the skin. Data from RFID tracking stations mounted on telephone
poles will be transmitted to police and social service workers, who will use custom
Windows NT software to track movements of the homeless in real time.In what has
become a chronic social problem, people living in shelters and on the streets
do not seek adequate medical care and frequently contribute to the rising crime
rate in major cities. Supporters of subdermal RFID tracking say the technology
will discourage implanted homeless men and women from committing crimes, while
making it easier for government workers to provide social services such as delivering
food and medicine.Duke called the RFID tagging pilot program "a high-tech,
minimally-intrusive way for the government to lift our citizens away from the
twin perils of poverty and crime." Participating cities include New York
City, San Francisco, Washington, and Bethlehem, Penn. Participating states
will receive grants of $14 million to $58 million from the federal Projects for
Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) program, which was created under
the McKinney Act to fund support services for the homeless. A second phase of
the project, scheduled to be completed in early 2005, will wirelessly transmit
live information on the locations of homeless people to handheld computers running
the Windows CE operating system.A spokesman for the National Coalition for the
Homeless, which estimates that there are between 2.3 million and 3.5 million people
experiencing homelessness nationwide, said the pilot program could be easily abused. "We
have expressed our tentative support for the idea to HRSA, but only if it includes
privacy safeguards," the spokesman said. "So far it's unclear whether
those safeguards will actually be in place by roll-out."Chris Hoofnagle,
deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the mandatory
RFID program would be vulnerable to a legal challenge. "It is a glaring violation
of the Tenth Amendment, which says that powers not awarded to the government are
reserved to the people, and homeless people have just as many Tenth Amendment
rights as everyone else," said Hoofnagle, who is speaking about homeless
privacy at this month's Computers Freedom and Privacy conference in Berkeley,
Calif. While HRSA's program appears to be the first to forcibly implant
humans with RFID tags, the technology is becoming more widely adopted as retailers
use it to track goods. Wal-Mart Stores said last year that it will require its
top 100 suppliers to place RFID tags on shipping crates and pallets by January
2005.Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International http://www.politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2004-April/000573.html
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