Radio chips help morgue to track down corpses from Katrina devastation.

www.nola.com.../base/news-19/112790844195990.xml&storylist=louisiana

GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) — As body counts mounted and missing-person reports multiplied after Hurricane Katrina, some morgue workers began using tiny computer chips to keep track of unidentified remains.

Radio frequency identification chips — slender red cylinders about half an inch long — were implanted under the corpses' skin or placed inside body bags at two Mississippi counties.

Each VeriChip, donated by a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions Inc., emits a specific radio signal, enabling morgue workers to quickly locate and catalog the remains, speed the morgue-management process and reduce errors.

With 48 of the 133 bodies recovered in Harrison and Hancock counties still unidentified as of Sunday, Harrison County Coroner Gary T. Hargrove said the chips have been a boon to the Disaster Mortuary Operational Recovery Team he oversees.

"It's better enabled me to do my job as the coroner — tracking and getting people's loved ones back to them quickly," he said.

so in the future we probably expect that those radio chips may be used to track down us and as well as if we get killed also and they can find our bodies. for now they just putting the chips in bodies in chaotic bureaucracy where bodies are misplaced or left alone, etc.

I love RFID chips in materials. Cars, money, items. Its great for inventory keeping, tracking of items, etc.

I don't see any reason to chip people. I'm a big supporter of RFID in our ID cards, possession, and just about everything except us.

We should always be free of tracking if we so choose. Asking the world not to benefit from RFID is just plain paranoid. It too useful for too many things to not use. Chipping people is horrendeous. If we choose to wear chips in our clothes, shoes, cars, whatever, thats a choice and we can always abandon them if we want. A chip should never enter the human body, even in death.

The need to identify the dead is just stupid. They are dead, they were burried, thier families mourned. Its over.

Never in the human body. And this from a supporter of the technology and someone in an industry pushing for the use of RFID.

I'm a big supporter of RFID in our ID cards

Wow and you're a Physist! When Mastercard and Bankcards are ALL enabled with RFID expect Identity theft to skyrocket. Privacy advocates are not being overly paranoid, they hit the nail on the head with this one.

We shouldn't even be considering implementing this technology into ID cards or Bank cards or any Card until the problem of Identity theft is dealt with as realistically as possible.

No offense Quest but you left yourself wide open on that sentance there... and this comes from someone who knows just how underreported Identity theft really is in this day and age(Have family that works for the ID Theft dept in a large bank)

RFID chips are going to start cropping up in more and more places. We'll need to make things much more secure before being able to impliment them, that is "until the problem of Identity theft is dealt with as realistically as possible." They do, and will continue to, come in handy in a variety of places, unfortunate as those places may be.