Rumours are circulating that all American citizens will undergo mandatory microchipping with RFID tracking devices, by the year 2017. Some variants assert that this has been confirmed by NBC News.
The theory that the American government is actively looking to implant Americans with RFID tracking chips to help control the US population is a long running conspiracy that is persistent as it is utterly baseless. Despite the many, many different variants of this consistent conspiracy theory, no compelling evidence has ever been offered to support the baseless and paranoid claims.
If the notion that Americans will soon be microchipped by a certain date rings a bell, then it’s hardly a surprise. This isn’t the first time we’ve written about this. Earlier permutations of this hoax have stretched back a number of years. After the introduction of Obamacare, a conspiracy spread online that part of the new healthcare reform bill would mandate that all US citizens be microchipped by March 2012.
But it didn’t stop there. Subsequent, near identical, versions spread years after, merely changing the “deadline date” to March 2013, then again to March 2014.
In 2014 the rumour changed somewhat, and now the American government was allegedly pushing the Ebola threat as a cover to covertly place RFID chips in Ebola vaccines which were to be used with every US citizen, a procedure that apparently would have occurred back in 2014.
The nonsense has even spread to Europe. Another variation of this conspiracy asserted that all babies born in Europe would be microchipped by May 2014.
Needless to say, none of these rumours turned out to be even remotely true.
However more recent versions spreading primarily through conspiracy-inclined websites use an excerpt from an NBC report back in 2007 to support their claims that mandatory microchipping would be a thing of the not-too-distance future. The report – however – was merely a speculative piece that simply provided conjecture on what the United States could look like a decade on from the date of the report (so, 2017) in regards to the increased usage of biometric data, which includes fingerprints, iris recognition, and yes, the possible use of microchips used for identification.
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Of course, as we said, the NBC report was merely speculative, discussing the development of biometric technology, and it did not suggest or even imply that Americans would be mandatorily microchipped in 2017, nor – for that matter – ever. Nor did the NBC article mention that microchips would be used to either track or control the American population, which some theorists maintain will inevitably happen.
Thus the assertions made by many conspiracy theorists that NBC news “reported” that all Americans will be microchipped by 2017 is a totally baseless and incorrect accusation.
It seems that many conspiracy theorists have simply attempted to take the NBC report entirely out of context to make it fit in with their preconceived ideologies, something we often see in the conspiracy inclined community.
The future of biometric data is certainly an exciting one as it is certainly an emerging technology, and using microchips to hold certain information about its holder may certainly be possible in a number of years. However claiming that people will be obligated to be implanted with such chips, and that they can be used to control the population, or even kill off “unwanted” or “troublesome” individuals (as many theories claim), is just pure paranoid nonsense with no basis in reality.