I have been following the recent debates about Radio Frequency ID tags closely. (The image is from AIM, the RFID trade group.)

RFID is a vital Always-On technology. With RFID on your stuff, you can have complete control of your personal inventory through a wireless network.

But RFID markets don't work that way. RFID applications will come at us through business. The initial demand will come from big merchants and governments seeking tighter control of their huge inventories, not from you and I seeking some control over our small inventories.

And, to me, that's fine. That's how computing markets work. You go from big applications to small, from business to consumer. So what is this debate really about?

It's about government, of course. It's about the role of government, and in the end it's about whether government can be trusted. (That's the statue of Justice on the Old Bailey in London, courtesy the BBC.)

That's the wrong debate, in my opinion. Trust is an absolute. Talk instead about whether government can be controlled.

I think it can be.

Call me crazy, call me a cock-eyed optimist, or just call me an American. Gut I believe democracy, that liberty, that checks and that balances can control government. Not perfectly. There is no such thing as perfection. But we can prevent many horrors, stop many others, and provide redress for most of those that happen.

What's required for that, however, is action, from everyone. Not just politicians, but journalists, and citizens, from you.

We need strong legal controls over the information on RFID chips. We need to enshrine this principle in our law -- the data belongs to the owner of the goods. And we need sanctions strong enough to make examples of those who violate this principle, to dissuade others from abusing the power of the technology.

The current argument is over whether it's possible to do this. I say that if it's not, then there is no such thing as legitimate government, no honest way for we, the people to manage our own affairs, that it's just a jungle and civilization a charade.

I prefer to believe differently. I didn't say it wasn't difficult to control RFID. But it's difficult to control the abuse of every technology, including this one. RFID is just another technology.

We do just what we do with any other technology.

We start with bright lines, written in law, separating right from wrong. We enforce the lines through every means at our disposal -- including exposure through the news and civil suits in the courts. It will never be perfect, but we'll always keep trying to do better. As we have for centuries, with increasingly comfortable results.

Let's not let our fear of government turn us all into Ned Ludd.