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  • 2016-12-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Congress Pass a Bill Allowing the Government to Microchip Citizens with 'Mental Disabilities'? (en)
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  • On 8 December 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 4919 (also known as Kevin and Avonte's Law), a bill reauthorizing the Missing Alzheimer’s Disease Patient Alert Program — a program that, until it expired in 2013, provided federal grants to locally based agencies and organizations for the purposes of protecting and locating missing patients with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia (with an added provision supporting the same services for missing patients with developmental disabilities such as autism). The bill's sponsor, Republican Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, explained the motivation behind it as follows (in part): After being approved by the House, Smith's bill was sent to the Senate, which adjourned for the year before acting on it. There was little controversial about H.R. 4919, apart from the authorization of tracking devices to monitor patients at risk for wandering. Not without good reason, privacy concerns have always arisen when the phrase tracking device appears in government legislation. There are cases, however, when such concerns mushroom into full-blown paranoia. Often, as in the present case, this is due to the spread of misinformation. An article originally published on TrueActivist.com and subsequently reposted on other web sites, including Anonymous News, described a provision of H.R. 4919 as follows (emphasis added): The suggestion that H.R. 4919 is simply a short step along the road from safeguarding dementia and autism patients to microchipping the entire populace and implementing a police state is based far more on alarmism than fact, however. First, it is not the case that NBC Nightly News predicted that all Americans would have RFID microchips implanted in their bodies by 2017 (we debunked this false rumor long ago). Second, although the wording of H.R. 4919 may raise some legitimate discussion about privacy concerns, it does not provide for microchipping anyone — not people with Alzheimer's, not people with autism, not the general populace. The bill clearly restricts the type of tracking devices to be used to ones that are non-invasive and non-permanent: Another paragraph defined the terms employed in the paragraph quoted above: (Previous iterations of the law, in effect through 2013, called for the use of simple ID bracelets.) Third, while it's true that the legislation calls for the U.S. Attorney General to consult with the Secretary of Health and Human services and leading research, advocacy, self-advocacy, and service organizations to establish best practices for the use of such tracking devices, its language, again, specifies that those devices be non-invasive and non-permanent. It also requires that the best practices include procedures to safeguard privacy, criteria for establishing in each case that a tracking device is the least restrictive alternative to prevent harm to a patient, measures for preventing abuse, protection of the civil rights and liberties of the patient, and a complaint and investigation process to address reported abuses of the program. Lastly, the bill specifies that use of tracking devices is strictly voluntary and prohibits the federal government from establishing databases that gather information collected from such devices: Kevin and Avonte's Law was reintroduced to Congress at the end of 2017 as HR 4221. The Senate has passed it, but the House of Representatives has not yet voted upon their version. (en)
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