George Orwell’s 1984 lives and could come to your body soon

Mark Gasson, a University of Reading researcher, infected himself intentionally with a computer virus in a computer chip implanted in his hand. The reason for doing this is to learn how the virus in his infected chip could transfer to radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) and spread the disease. I have done a couple of posts on the RFID concept over the years you can see here and here.

Before he had even left the Reading lab setting, the virus had inserted itself into the building’s computer and replicated itself through databases, with the ability to copy itself to computer access cards. In other words, it could move at will as long as there was a wireless system to receive its signal. You can see the article here on MSNBC.

Shades of Orwell’s “Telescreen” in his novel, 1984, that monitored every move made by the citizens of Oceania. “A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.” says Jackie Jura, whose site, Orwell Today is a wealth of information for those of you who believe we are losing our right to privacy. In the same manner, any data you might have stored on yourself that could be read by an RFID chip could be whisked away in seconds.

As Winston, Orwell’s protagonist in 1984 put it, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” But this could change quickly if for some reason or other it was decided to implant chips in the brains of all human beings, much like they do with animals now. Even George Orwell didn’t think of that, but I’ll be there are those out there who have.