The Handmaid's Tale - The Beginning
Anyone who has read The Handmaid's Tale likely remembers how the malevolent government in the book began to assert its control. It all began with national identity cards that stored all personal information electronically. These cards were then linked to banking and credit accounts. It became a trivial issue for "the powers that be" to shut off access to certain people or classes of people, forcing them to comply with government mandates in order to continue to eat. Those who attempted to run were easily tracked since access to just about everything in this world was controlled based on the ID card.
Well guess what? H.B. 418 which passed the House 261-161 mandates exactly that scenario. In a world where we have at least weekly reports of data piracy and identity theft, it seems counter intuitive to gather it all into one place so that it's even easier to compromise. These new ID cards, complete with RFID and "undefined" personal information encoding would be required to fly (despite ongoing lawsuits like John Gilmore's that attempt to force the government to reveal WHAT particular law mandates that we "show our papers" for domestic travel), required to enter many types of government buildings, etc.
How easy it would be to have a "glitch" that shut off access to "suspected terrorists." How about those who had passed an RFID checkpoint too close to the home of a "suspected terrorist?" Or even those who used a particular terminal in a cyber cafe that was linked to anonymous speech advocating US withdrawl from Iraq?
Far fetched? Go take a look at H.B. 418 at http://thomas.loc.gov.