farmdoc's blog post number 454

I’m not a nocturnal soul. That is, I don’t go walking in the bush at night. So I don’t know what happens to the wombats I’ve released on our property. I’d love to know how far and wide they roam, where their burrows are, and who’s shacked up with whom. Last year I enquired about tracking devices, but they’re way beyond my price range. Not so the Victorian government’s, apparently. The government was outed last Monday when this Age article exposed its secret plan to track staff movement around the new Royal Children's Hospital using radio tags. Doctors and unions have attacked this ‘comprehensive patient and staff radio frequency identification [RFID] tracking system’. I agree with them. But what about Gilad Shalit? For over three years he’s been secreted somewhere in Gaza, and Israel can’t find him. Emboldened, Hamas and Hezbollah are intent on kidnapping more Israeli soldiers. If a tiny tracking device was implanted internally in each soldier, it’d simplify pinpointing that soldier’s whereabouts. Tight legal safeguards are definitely needed. And no doubt there are some technical problems, e.g. it must be undetectable by x-ray, and not jammable. But they should be solvable by Israel’s tech geniuses. Given the massive expenditure on the search and negotiation aspects in the Shalit case, an RFID programme would be cost effective if, heaven forbid, future kidnappings occur. And if they don’t, it’ll be excellent insurance.