Came across this page today for something called the ID Sniper, a modified sniper rifle that fires a GPS tracking chip into a target (without the target being aware of it) to allow tracking of the chip. Supposedly it feels like “a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.” The idea is to allow law enforcement agencies to keep track of suspicious people. Sounds like [a valuable tool in the “War on Terror” || a Big Brother control device] depending on your point of view. There’s one other thing though: it’s not real. It just seemed implausible to be able to hit someone with something as large as a GPS device at a high enough velocity to penetrate skin and still be unnoticeable. Their other product “JUJU the Citizen Eye” seems pretty obviously satirical. A quick Googling confirmed that it was indeed a hoax. The scary thing is though, that even though this one isn’t real, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if something like this were actually under development somewhere. It’s honestly not that far out.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-22 07:26:58 +0000

Yiiikes.