The Bermuda Government gave me a gift for my birthday this week. It is a computer chip (a radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chip) stuck to the windshield of my car. You’ll get one too, when your birthday comes around, for your car or your bike.

The chip, which every vehicle in Bermuda will carry within a year or two, represents a very real reduction in human rights. It is much easier to save money in a free society than in a closed society. No one in Myanmar (formerly Burma) or North Korea is getting rich these days. You’ll find it harder to save money once someone puts these chips to the many uses that they were created to serve.

It should be stated that Dr. Brown, the Transport Minister who introduced this system, has said that he does not intend the chip to be used for any purpose other than tracking down drivers whose vehicles are not registered. I believe he means it, but it is not Dr. Brown’s intentions we have to worry about. It will take time to put the system in place, and Dr. Brown has said that he does not intend to stay in power forever.

The person to worry about is the Premier who succeeds Dr. Brown, or the one who succeeds that one. The chip system is the perfect method for keeping close track of citizens, a dictator’s dream.

It is indicative that the first country after Bermuda to announce its support for this system was Singapore, where human rights rate low in importance.

An RFID chip can be automatically read from several yards away and does not have to be in the line of sight of the chip reader. When the readers have been installed on every telephone pole across the Island, and probably buildings too, Government will have access to a database that will be able to report where we are, where we’ve been, the route we took to get there, and the speed at which we drove to get there.

The following are some of the uses to which the chip will be put when a less thoughtful Premier than Dr. Brown decides to take advantage of the uses to which the RFID chips in our vehicles can be put:

* The end of the radar gun: If you know the moment at which a car passes a telephone pole, and the moment at which it passes the next telephone pole, you can work out the car’s speed as it travelled between the poles. A computer programme could make the calculations in a split second. In the future, Police officers will be able to arrive at work and find on their desks a listing of every speeding offence committed in Bermuda in the previous 24 hours. That could result in fewer drivers on the road. If you drive at more than 20 miles per hour, that could mean you.

* Tracking your location: RFID chips are used by corporations to keep track of the whereabouts of containers around the world. The Bermuda system will know and record which was the last telephone pole your car passed. If you are driving to see your mistress, you’d better hope that your wife doesn’t work for the Government. If you take the day off work to go fishing and phone in sick, your employer might be able to ask the Government to confirm or deny your story.

* Congestion charging: New York City and others use RFID chips to enable drivers to pass through toll booths without stopping; the charge is recorded and a bill is sent at the end of the month (or prepayment is required). A similar system in London has reduced traffic a little and cut business profits by a reported 40 percent.

* Fewer unlicensed drivers: This is the official reason for these chips. I bought into the idea until I relicensed my car and discovered that the sticker with your birthdate written in large type on it remains in use. Why?

Presumably the idea is that if every registered car and bike has a chip, a vehicle without a chip must be unregistered. But, if a car without a chip goes past a chip reader, the reader won’t register the car and would therefore be useless in that regard.

If the idea is that traffic wardens can spot a car without a chip in its window, does that mean that they can’t read the expiry date of the present licence written in huge letters and numbers on the existing sticker in the car’s window? An explanation of how the highly laudable goal of taking unlicensed drivers off the road is to be achieved would be most welcome.***Bermuda has a Human Rights Commission. If the Commission were really interested in human rights, it would be screaming blue murder over these RFID chips. It hasn’t said a word.

We didn’t hear much from the Opposition when these chips were being debated, either. Apparently, human rights mean nothing in Bermuda these days.

It’s too late now to do anything about it. A $10,000 penalty applies if you remove the chip from your vehicle, which is an extraordinary punishment compared to the fines for other, more dangerous crimes.

That suggests how seriously the Government takes the benefits these chips are about to provide. No public information campaign mentioned the penalty until it was too late.

And finally this: Regardless of what you might think about human rights, driving rule number one is to place nothing on the dashboard or windshield of a car that interferes with the driver’s view of the world outside the car.

The RFID chip, which is buried in a credit card-sized sticker, is being placed directly in the driver’s line of vision on the left-hand side of the windshield. On most vehicles, it will go above the existing sticker, cutting down visibility even further out of the left-hand side of the windshield.

If you are overtaking a bus at a bus stop, and a child darts out in front of the bus, as children do, because of the sticker and now the chip, you may not see the child until you have run him or her over. Even one injured child is too high a price to pay for whatever benefit these RFID chips are supposed to bring. Elsewhere, the current thrust in RFID use is in inventory control. In Britain, RFID chips are used to keep track of sheep. Write the last sentence of this opinion column yourself.