The March 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum ran my article "Hands On: How radio-frequency identification and I got personal" as its cover story. Two years into living with the implants, engineering's flagship magazine handed me the keys to tell it myself: the procedure, the door locks, the motorcycle ignition, and the second, crypto-capable tag in my right hand. Getting my own personal print copy in the mail was a good day.

The photography had its moments. The photographer set up the shoot in a church, of all places, and worked on film, which surprised me in 2007 given all the digital artistry applied to the photos afterward. The magazine's art department also produced a good illustrated explainer of how an advanced one-time-code RFID lock works.

In the same issue, Kenneth R. Foster and Jan Jaeger contributed "RFID Inside: The murky ethics of implanted chips." My take at the time, and still: the implant-ethics debate mostly aims at the wrong target. Biometric systems (face, fingerprint, iris, eventually DNA) identify people at a distance, without consent, and you can't opt out of your own face. An implant requires a deliberate act to read and can be removed in minutes. The tangible chip attracts the fear; the intangible face scan gets a pass.

And then there was the mail. The Spectrum piece brought a fresh bump in messages informing me that I'm the devil, or a government puppet, a genre I'd started calling "the basics," from the correspondents who had long since dubbed me "Satan's mouthpiece." I responded politely, declined the drawn-out spirited debates, and got back to work. The genre never stopped; two decades on, it has earned its own retrospective.

The articles, preserved

I recently turned up my own print copies of the March 2007 issue, and IEEE Spectrum still keeps the era’s companion pieces live on its own site. Below is the complete set; each entry links to the piece live at spectrum.ieee.org plus an archived PDF copy. I first linked the print scans from amal.net on March 7, 2007, the day my own print copy showed up in the mail.

Figure from RFID Inside: anatomy of an implanted RFID chip
From “RFID Inside,” IEEE Spectrum, March 2007: anatomy of an implanted chip.