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Now find me an inventor for the cameras…

14 September 2002

THE timing was extraordinary. For two weeks in August, the British media was saturated with the story of the grim abduction and murder of two ten-year-old girls. Then, within days of the suspects being charged, came news of an invention that could ease the understandably inflated anxiety of parents. An implant that could be embedded discreetly under the skin of a child’s wrist. Should the child wander off or fail to turn up when they ought, her parents could phone the device and it would broadcast her position.

The story raced around the globe. Newspapers carried photographs of the chip’s…

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