There is a new technology creeping into our lives with little fan fare and little notice. It started with an idea to track cattle in the wake of Canada's mad cow scare. Now it is popping up all over the place - implanted microchips with global positioning satellite (GPS) tracking capability. It is the fortuitous marriage of two technologies - super miniaturization and the advent of small satellites.

A virtual "tagging" frenzy seems to be going on.

* Scotland will be testing tagging of asylum seekers

* Chip Implanted in Mexico Judicial Workers

* Satellites will track 5,000 of the worst criminals in Britain

I am not the only one who is concerned at this development. Uri Dowbenko writes Verichip:Mark of the Beast Microchip Implants , and Brian Rudman in the New Zealand Herald adds Spy to track every move, slug us at every turn.

The implantation of microchips linked to GPS is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. There are ads to "tag" pets as well as cattle and other animals. The examples above show the technology in relationship to criminals, politicians, and asylum seekers. How long will it be before it is suggested that we tag:

Heck, let's just tag everything that moves. Let's tag all toys, foods, medicines, and vehicles, and anything else that may be subject to recall. You could link the GPS data from the tag to a database of addresses. Link that to a list of residents (or bills to that address) and then automatically generate personalized recall and warning letters.

Or, if you have the bucks -- or maybe someone will come up with a service -- let's tag all those constantly "lost" and "misplaced" things like, glasses, keys and remote controls. Or tag things that may get stolen or left behind such as credit cards.

Libraries could tag their books. Employers their workers. There have been lots of complaints that workers who travel out of the office diverging from their assigned itineraries, so let's tag all of them.

Of course, all of these initiatives also entail having satellites to provide monitoring (or systems of them for things that move beyond a given region). Pretty soon we may essentially blanket the sun with a wall of satellites between the Earth and the Sun. A not so distant problem might be navigating around the hundreds of thousands of satellites in orbit, or even what to do as their orbits decay and they start crashing back into the atmosphere. I know, let's rig all of them to blow up into infinitesimal pieces. Oh yeah, those little projectiles could puncture anything else passing through their debris fields. Maybe that creates another "opportunity" -- companies to recover and remove errant and dead satellites.

In the end, we can just tag everything born, grown, or created and track it all. Of course, that might get a bit complicated trying to monitor all of it, but that's what super computers are for ... isn't it?