Hasn’t happened yet, but the intention announced by Tommy Thompson, a former aide to president Bush, to have injected an RFID chip in his body is already all over the news and on several blogs today.Why is Mr Thompson willing of doing that? Well, it gets complicated. According to CNN Mr. Thomson, who in the past was also governor of Wisconsin, recently became part of the board of Applied Digital , which is the controlling company of VeriChip, where you can order an RFID tag and have it injected under your own skin or under your pet’s.Still not clear about the benefits of an RFID tag? Well perhaps I should explain that a VeriChip tag is essentially a miniature radio emitting an RF signal that can be used for identification. For example, watching Animal Planet (BTW, one of my favorite channels) I learned that some shelters, before giving pets away for adoption, are injecting a microchip that identifies their new owner. The general idea is to quickly get back at the owner if or when the pet ends up at the shelter again.Well, those millimeter sized RFID tags can also be injected into a human body and it only takes a casual browsing of the VeriChip site to find out that: “In the security field, the company is actively developing applications for VeriChip in a variety of security, defense, homeland security and secure-access applications“.If the idea of a microchip under your skin makes you uncomfortable, you are not alone. Many people find an unpleasant analogy with the tattooed id of the Nazi lagers, while others even see a sinister, demonic shadow emanating from that after all innocuous chip. Which explains why Mr Thompson want to have one injected, hoping perhaps to defuse some of the public hostility to the chip with his own sacrifice and boost company sales.To be honest, even if Mr. Thompson succeeds in making it more popular, I doubt that the chip will ever make a big difference in our fight against terrorism. For example how are we going to inject a tag to Bin Laden and his band of murderers?Nevertheless, I can’t help finding that Mr. Thompson gesture is an admirable example of company loyalty. Wouldn’t be great if other leaders would show a similar attitude? Imagine Joe Tucci committing himself to publicly manage a Clariion or a Symmetrix box, or FDA officers taking repeated doses of the drugs they approve.Brings to mind some scenes from Dante’s Inferno, doesn’t it?