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  • 2016-01-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Must Citizens Who Want to Receive Government Benefits Agree to Be Microchipped? (en)
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  • Rumors of imminent, wide-scale, mandatory radio-frequency identification (RFID) chipping in humans have circulated for many years. Some claimed Obamacare involved mandatory microchipping (it didn't), others held that a large number of Americans already sported RFID chips, and still more maintained that vulnerable populations, such as the homeless, were being chipped without consent in massive swaths. A long-circulating variation on the latter claim involved individuals who received government assistance such as food stamps (SNAP) or general forms of what's known as welfare (such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF). Claims that welfare recipients would receive mandatory RFID chips weren't novel in January 2016: the unreliable web site Disclose.tv featured a page with much of the same language in November 2011. Not long after that version appeared, a nearly identical version was published by the disreputable and plagiaristic WorldTruth.tv web site. An undated piece (published on 27 December 2011) on that site involved a mishmash of information tangentially related to the claim about forcible microchipping, primarily citing a 1 December 1999 report from the United States Department of Agriculture. The sixteen-year-old report focused on preliminary research into the use of biometric identification technology for such programs, but it very clearly didn't reference RFID chips. The technologies under discussion were biometric identifiers, not microchip implantation: A portion of WorldTruth.tv's page was lifted directly from a conversational thread on Disclose.tv published a few weeks earlier: Following directives to enter RFID into search fields on the listed government sites yielded no results. The United States Department of Agriculture web site, through which federal food stamps provisions are routed, yielded no search hits whatsoever. Some results were returned on FMI.org (the web site of the Food Marketing Institute), but none of them pertained to RFID use by federal agencies on food stamp recipients. All searches led back either to other conspiracy stories, or research unrelated to RFID chips and food stamps or welfare. This rumor began circulating in 2011 (or earlier), yet since then no food stamp recipients have reported undergoing RFID chipping, forcible or otherwise. No credible items cited (such as the 1999 USDA report) had anything at all to do with RFID chip use in food stamp recipients. (en)
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