CASPIAN RELEASES NEW EVIDENCE OF VERICHIP LIES AND DECEPTION

To all the friends and visitors of OSA, the Opponents of the VeriChip implant are launching a new offensive against the controversial human microchip this week, amid reports that VeriChip plans to put its chipping division on the auction block. A new report titled “Microchip Implants: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions” released today by CASPIAN Consumer Privacy reveals dirty laundry the company would probably rather keep hidden as it seeks a buyer for its beleaguered product.

photo credit: nr1

The 42-page report was authored by CASPIAN director Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard-educated privacy expert and long-time critic of the VeriChip. The highlight of the report is an eleven-page section titled “Cancer Cover-up” that describes a systematic pattern of lies and deception engaged by VeriChip executives in an effort to downplay the fact that implantable microchips cause cancer in laboratory animals.

The report reveals how news outlets like Time Magazine, Business Week, and the RFID Journal were used as unwitting pawns in a VeriChip scheme to spread misinformation about the cancer studies. Since research linking the product to cancer first surfaced last year, each of these publications has repeated misstatements from VeriChip company executives, in many cases printing the inaccurate statements verbatim and unchallenged.

photo credit: kkennedy

“These were not subjective issues, they were plainly verifiable issues of fact,” Albrecht said. “We were saddened to see the misstatements fall through the fact-checking cracks of these respected publications. Now that VeriChip is back in the headlines, we felt it was time to set the record straight.”

VeriChip’s media efforts have done little to salvage the company’s public image or its financial performance, both of which plummeted after research linking the implantable microchip to cancer was widely revealed by the Associated Press in September 2007. The same company that once predicted revenues in the “billions” earned just $3,000 from its microchip implant operations in the first quarter of 2008, as patients shun the device that many are now calling the “cancer chip.”

photo credit: Andrew Currie

Investors have also distanced themselves from the failing company, with VeriChip’s stock plummeting from a high of $10.62 last year to just over $2.00 today.

VeriChip’s VP of business development, Jay McKeage, acknowledged the implant division suffers from “a substantial cash burn” and is “not sustainable on its own.” As a result, he says, VeriChip plans to “shop

the VeriMed / Health Link [human implantable chip] business around widely” in hopes that another company will take the unpopular product off its hands.

However, with recent blog headlines like “VeriChip Death Watch” making the rounds, Albrecht has a hard time imagining who, if anyone, will want to buy the business.

“This is a company that has engaged in a consistent pattern of making false and misleading statements,” she said. “It has lied to the public, to the media, to its shareholders, and to regulatory agencies,” she said, citing additional evidence from the report indicating that VeriChip hid cancer evidence from the FDA when the agency reviewed the implant’s safety in 2004.

“We laid out all the evidence in our report,” she added. “We want to make sure no one else gets burned by VeriChip.”

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ABOUT THE REPORT

CASPIAN’s new report, “Microchip Implants: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions,” is a comprehensive reference guide to implantable microchips in animals and humans. It provides thoroughly-researched, footnoted answers to 85 of the most commonly asked questions about the implantable microchip, including religious, privacy, social, and health questions. The report concludes with a list of recommendations for patients, pet owners, and policy makers affected by the device.

The new report is available for free download on the group’s AntiChips.com website at:

http://www.antichips.com/faq/index.html

While on the website, readers are encouraged to download Dr. Albrecht’s comprehensive 52-page overview of the studies, “Microchip-Induced Tumors in Laboratory Rodents and Dogs: A Review of the Literature 1990-2006,” and to review scanned copies of the original documents.

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ABOUT CASPIAN

CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) is a grass-roots consumer group fighting retail surveillance schemes since 1999 and irresponsible RFID use since 2002. With thousands of members in all 50 U.S. states and over 30 countries worldwide, CASPIAN seeks to educate consumers about marketing strategies that invade their privacy and encourage privacy-conscious shopping habits across the retail spectrum.

http://www.spychips.com/

http://www.antichips.com/

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CASPIAN - Group’s Latest Report Sets Record Straight on Chip Implants, Cancer, and more!

The Active Card Control technology is an extension of it’s commercial card product suite. Using the technology, the client can reset the available funds on each card as frequently as necessary through a Web-based tool. When initially issued, cards will have $0 in available funds until the client is ready to pay the supplier. At that time, the client submits a purchase request through the Bank of America Works application, which uses the Active Card Control technology to fund individual cards with the exact amount of the invoices to be paid. When those purchases are billed to the card, the available funds go to zero.

The bank says that benefits of Active Card Control for the client include improved administrative efficiency and lower costs from not having to raise and lower credit limits or change single transaction limits; increased control over purchasing due to a mandatory approval process; reduced paperwork; and ease of implementation as purchase requests can be used with any card program that uses the Works platform.

This effectively makes fraud among corporations a little easier to manage and possibly reduce the amount of fraud cases. This is another step in the right direction for all consumers.

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Bank of America has been granted a patent for its Active Card Control solution…

Katherine Albrecht, Ed.D., is about to leave for Phoenix, where she and other advocates will be briefing the Arizona state legislature on privacy issues associated with new remotely-readable, spychipped “enhanced” driver’s licenses. If you are in the area, you are invited to join us on Thursday evening for a public town hall meeting on the topic sponsored by the Arizona ACLU tomorrow night.

As you may know, several states, including Arizona, Washington, Vermont, and New York have agreed to issue the RFID-tagged cards for border-crossing purposes. The idea is that state residents who voluntarily pay an extra $40 to receive the remotely-trackable cards will be allowed to cross more “efficiently” into Canada or Mexico, since border officials will see them coming before they reach the guard station.

photo credit: myuibe

To anyone who’s clued in about RFID, the spychipped driver’s licenses are a complete privacy nightmare, however. They can be silently read from 20-feet away, through a person’s wallet, pocket, backpack, or purse — even when the target is in a moving car. They are unencrypted and contain a unique ID number that can be used to identify and track people miles from the border — indeed, anywhere the government chooses to put a reader.

But it’s not just the government that could use the cards to track and surveil people. Anyone with a rudimentary RFID reader can remotely access the the unique ID number on the card. Retailers could use them to ID customers as they walk in the door. Marketers could use them to track people around the store. Stalkers could use them to track their victims. Terrorists could scan for them in crowds and pinpoint Americans traveling in other countries. Hackers could duplicate the signal emitted by chipped licenses to impersonate people. The list of potential abuses for the ill-conceived ID card are staggering.

If you are in Phoenix and would like to learn more, the ACLU is hosting a Town Hall Meeting tomorrow evening (Thursday, 3/13) at 7:00 PM at the University of Arizona. She will deliver a PowerPoint presentation on RFID-tagged ID cards and sign books after the event, so be sure to bring your copy of Spychips (or you can pick one up while you’re there).

The event is free and open to the public. Further details are available below my signature, or on-line here: Press Release

If you cannot attend in person, please send your prayers and well wishes with us to the state of Arizona, as we work to inform the public about the encroaching police state.

Your Online Security Authority,

Bill Wardell

Please support, Dr. Katherine Albrecht
Founder and Director, CASPIAN: Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering — Opposing supermarket loyalty cards and other retail surveillance schemes since 1999

http://www.spychips.com/
http://www.nocards.org/

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RFID-tagged cards for border-crossing purposes.

CASPIAN RELEASES MICROCHIP CANCER REPORT
Sets record straight after misleading claims by HomeAgain and VeriChip implant manufacturers A new paper titled “Microchip-Induced Tumors in Laboratory Rodents and Dogs: A Review of the Literature 1990-2006″ has been released today by CASPIAN. The full, 48-page paper provides a definitive review of the academic literature showing a causal link between implanted radio-frequency (RFID) microchip transponders and cancer in laboratory rodents and dogs. In addition, a brief, four-page synopsis of the full report is being made available.

Eleven articles previously published in toxicology and pathology journals are evaluated in the report. In six of the articles, between 0.8% and 10.2% of laboratory mice and rats developed malignant tumors around or adjacent to the microchips, and several researchers suggested the actual tumor rate may have been higher. Two additional articles reported microchip-related cancer in dogs.

In almost all cases, the malignant tumors, typically sarcomas, arose at the site of the implants and grew to surround and fully encase the devices. In several cases the tumors also metastasized or spread to other parts of the animals.

Public revelation of a casual link between microchipping and cancer in animals has prompted widespread public concern over the safety of implantable microchips. The story was first broken to the public in September through an article written by Associated Press Reporter Todd Lewan. Prior to the AP story, the journal articles were completely unknown outside of small academic circles.

“The AP did a superb job informing the public of the existence of these journal articles,” said Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a leading privacy expert and long-time VeriChip opponent who authored the new paper.”Unfortunately,” Dr. Albrecht added, “a lot of misinformation about the cancer research has circulated since Mr. Lewan’s article was published. I wrote the report to set the record straight.”

The animal-microchip study findings were so compelling that one of Mr. Lewan’s sources, Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, was quoted as saying, “There’s no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members.”

Nevertheless, representatives of the chipping industry have made inaccurate public statements about the research findings in an effort to confuse the public.

Scott Silverman, CEO of the VeriChip Corporation which makes the controversial VeriChip human implant, recently provided inaccurate information to Time Magazine. Mr. Silverman is quoted as saying that none of the tumors found in mice in a 2006 French study were malignant.

In fact, not only were the tumors malignant sarcomas, but most of the afflicted animals died prematurely as a result of the microchip-associated tumors.

In addition, Destron Fearing, makers of the HomeAgain pet implant, dismissed a finding of  fibrosarcoma–a highly lethal cancer–as ‘benign’ in a recent report.

A fibrosarcoma is a type of sarcoma, a malignant tumor of soft tissue that connects, supports or surrounds other structures and organs of the body. Dr. Timothy Jennings, an expert on implant-induced cancers in humans, said he was “not aware of any nosology incorporating an entity of ‘benign fibrosarcoma’” and agreed that “any tumor classified as sarcoma should be viewed as malignant.”

“Either VeriChip and the makers of HomeAgain actually don’t understand the difference between a benign fibroma and a malignant fibrosarcoma,” noted Dr. Albrecht, “or they’re deliberately lying to the public. Either way, it’s clear they can’t be trusted. We hope our new report will set the record straight.”

The report includes a one- to three-page writeup on each of the original studies. In addition to a detailed review of the academic literature, the report contains recommendations for patients, pet owners, veterinarians, and policy makers, including the following:

(1) Further microchipping of humans should be immediately discontinued;
(2) Implanted patients should be informed in writing of the research
findings and offered a procedure for microchip removal; and
(3) Policy makers should reverse all animal microchipping mandates.

As part of its public awareness campaign, CASPIAN will be issuing copies of the new report to leading policy and decision makers.

The full 48-page report and four-page synopsis are also immediately available for public download at http://www.antichips.com/cancer/

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Microchip-Induced Tumors in Laboratory Rodents and Dogs

A U.S. government plan to use long-range RFID technology as part of a border-crossing security initiative is coming under intensified fire by an industry group.

Beginning Jan. 31, 2008, a valid driver’s licenses won’t be enough for travelers to pass between the United States and Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda, under new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rules. A standard government passport will be required, or a birth certificate with driver’s license. But as an alternative, DHS is moving forward with a pilot program that has states adding long-range RFID technology to driver’s licenses.

The idea is to have U.S. border guards with RFID readers quickly read a traveler’s RFID-enhanced driver’s license remotely and make a face check and watch for any posted security red flags pulled up by a database.

But the RFID technology is coming under fire from some, including the industry group Smart Card Alliance, which says long-range RFID is a bad idea in terms of security and operational efficiency.

“Long-range RFID is meant for tracking packages in a warehouse,” says Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, which has been tracking the laws and technology proposals for what DHS and Congress call the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), part of the many security revisions hammered out in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks six years ago. Read more…

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Plan to Use RFID in U.S. Border Control Draws Fire