Tagged is a roughly 30-minute documentary directed by Shawney Cohen and Mike Gallay, written by Julie Matlin, and produced by the National Film Board of Canada with TVO under the NFB-TVO Calling Card Program. It premiered on Canadian television on October 23, 2009, at 10:30 p.m. on TVO. Filming happened a year or two earlier. I flew to Toronto for a couple of days to be filmed assisting a live implantation and building a typical door-lock project, and got to know a small slice of Toronto pretty well in the process. My archive copy here is the DVD I received in May 2009, months ahead of the broadcast.
The film follows Mark Stepanek as he gets an EM4102 implant, with me assisting, alongside VeriChip CEO Scott Silverman and a roster of civil-liberties voices. It was great fun to be involved with, even if most of what I considered my "good stuff" ended up on the cutting room floor: the material on range limits, on what separates a hobbyist EM4102 from an RFID passport, and on why personal-context DIY systems sit differently in the privacy debate than national ID programs.
When it aired, I published a set of clarifications, which boil down to:
- We don't have VeriChips. The film never distinguishes VeriChip from the generic EM4102 Mark received. It matters: no corporate registry database, no anti-migration coating (so removal stays trivial), and hand placement instead of the FDA-mandated upper arm.
- Tracking is not possible, only logging. "Track" means real-time location on demand, which a cell phone delivers and a two-inch-range implant physically cannot. At most you'd get a connect-the-dots log of consensual reader scans; your credit card already does that far better.
- Facial recognition wasn't "10 to 15 years away." Bruce Schneier's line in the film had already been overtaken by airport and transit deployments by the time it aired.
- Not everyone will get an implant. Biometrics needs neither your consent nor a syringe, which is why it, not RFID, is the technology to watch.