The idea of a universal identification mark or number is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is mostly thanks to a guy named John who, the story goes, was exiled to the the Island of Patmos about 1,900 years ago. Being incredibly bored (or, who knows, maybe divinely inspired), he wrote the New Testament book of Revelations where it’s revealed that nobody would be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast.

Because of this, every time a technology comes along that allows for more efficient tracking of large numbers of items, it’s extrapolated forward to humans, and is immediately declared evil by some subset of the population. The latest round of evil technology that will send our souls to Hell is, of course, RFID tags, which can be implanted in a hand. Dangerous stuff.

“There is something about have a chunk of metal and plastic inserted beneath the skin that squicks people.”

I’ve argued for a long time that these technologies will never gain widespread adoption among people for precisely this reason. Too many people are on high alert for anything that remotely resembles the mark of the beast, and no amount of propaganda is going to work here. It’s one thing to assign people a number, a la social security; it’s quite another to implant devices in the skin, particularly considering the current generation of chips is only expected to last a decade. Besides, even among people who recognize the utility, there is something about have a chunk of metal and plastic inserted beneath the skin that squicks people.

In order for a mark-of-the-beast style tracking system to be accepted among people, a few things need to be true. It would have to be demystified. It has to be transparent to use. And to be effective, it would need to be even more capable than even today’s RFID’s.

Many people don’t know how RFID’s work. Before them, many people didn’t understand how bar codes worked, either, and they were often regarded with suspicion. Indeed, many people didn’t understand what the social security number was for, or even which one was theirs. Any ID technology is going to have to be demystified. Not completely understood, necessarily, but ubiquitous enough that it is accepted by most people without confusing them as to its purpose or utility.

It’s also going to have to be transparent in terms of its use. An RFID tag will have enormous resistance to tracking people because it’s not a transparent technology. To get the device, you have to go through a special procedure—however simple and painless is beside the point. It leaves something inside you which you can still see and/or feel, and it acts as a constant reminder that you are, in fact, being tracked. The tracking is not transparent to the process of setting up a system to track people. Even if folks aren’t concerned about the level of evil involved, they will still be wondering about the level of money involved, and any system is going to have a long uphill battle of selling benefits to convince people it’s worth the cost.

Finally, it’s going to need to be more active in its role than current RFID tags are. RFIDs (or barcodes, or even social security numbers, for that matter) are simply an identifier that points to an entry in a database somewhere else. This database is where all the juicy info is stored. Just pulling a number off an RFID doesn’t tell you much by itself, although it would be a trivial process to spoof the tag and get the information you want that way. But if we’re talking truly evil identification schemes, RFID doesn’t do a fraction of what you’d be looking for.

In thinking about this, I concluded that the cell phone comes awfully close to a more likely candidate for universal identification. It’s demystified and in use every day, it’s transparent as a tracking device, and it’s more capable than an RFID while still retaining a unique identifier. Not everyone has one, of course, and it’s still a simple procedure to spoof a phone number, so that’s not reliable, plus the phone networks are privatized—but other than that, it’s almost the ideal mark of the beast.

However, phones are evolving, and it seems short sighted to think they’re still going to be around in their current incarnation for more than a few years. Indeed, technology changes so quickly that any hardware such as a phone or a chip is likely to be outdated before its implementation. We need something that grows with the hardware.

I believe a likely candidate to act as a unique, mark-of-the-beast type identifier is the Internet Protocol, or IP address. The current IPv4 spec has been around since 1981, meaning it has seen enormous changes in hardware come and go without changing much. The IPv4 range is running out of available addresses, but this is expected to be remedied with the IPv6 specification, which provides enough addressing space for every human being in the world to have fifty octillion IP addresses just for them. Considering there are only around seven octillion atoms in a human body, that’s probably plenty.

It’s important to point out that IP was never conceived to be used as an identifier. It’s really nothing more than an address to allow one device to find another device over a network. It does not even reliably identify devices, as multiple devices can connect to the internet through one IP via a router, and different devices can, at various points in time, use the same IP. This would only make sense considering the number of devices which utilized an IP since 1981 is most likely much greater than the number of IPs in the v4 spec in use. This is at least part of the reason the RIAA’s lawsuits are so laughable. Anyone with a modicum of networking experience knows its impossible to definitively trace a single computer to a single IP—much less an individual legal entity that you can sue. I’m pretty sure the only reason they get away with this is because most people don’t have a modicum of networking experience.

However, with the proliferation of personal, portable computers like the iPhone, changing the function of an IP to act as an identifier is not so far fetched. Combine this with increased wifi coverage in metropolitan areas, and you’re looking at a potential internet-based, granular, and easy to implement system of identification based on an individual’s computer devices. There are a numerous technical hurdles, including the ease of spoofability, the problem of movement of devices through a network, ensuring the same person/device receives the same IP every time they enter the network, and so on. This leads me to believe the actual solution will be some combination of MAC addresses and IPs. After all, it is possible to assign static IPs based on MAC addresses—a necessity if one proposes to use a MAC+IP identification scheme.

More likely, the actual implementation of this will be not be like either IP or MAC addresses, but something else more appropriate to future technology. Still, this is my futurist prediction of the day: that the “mark of the beast” universal identifier will not be solely based upon some physical hardware like a chip or card, but that it will be tied to a nonphysical networking address space. I believe it’s the only thing likely to get past the majority of the conspiracy theorists, not to mention it offers the potential for greater granularity and flexibility than existing systems, while spreading the cost out across the implementation of a standard, as with IPv4/6.

I think it also makes sense if you look at past methods of addressing. A physical (mailing) address plus name used to be a unique identifier for many people. It still is in many instances, but since the information is public, it’s not considered secure. Shortly after the widespread adoption of cell phones, a law was passed allowing people to keep their cell phone number while they switched carriers. In the same way the physical address was associated with a person, the cell phone number could now be associated with a person for their entire life. The obvious progression here is to eventually assign networking addresses to individuals—the virtual address at which they can always be reached. As people live more and more of their lives online, the surveillance benefits of assigning a networking address to an individual become increasingly obvious.

I’m not saying that I agree or disagree with the potential for using IPs this way (or whatever the equivalent future technology will be). But I certainly don’t think a physical modification to one’s body is likely to be accepted by the majority of the population. Any identifier will need to be less intrusive and more subtle than this, and I believe a nonphysical network address fits the bill.

-Ted