New Yorker: Obama & Biden chipped or wearing tracking devices?

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While profiling White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza saw something interesting in Emanuel’s office. It’s mentioned only in passing:

Next to his computer monitor is a smaller screen that looks like a handheld G.P.S. device and tells Emanuel where the President and senior White House officials are at all times.

So, Obama, Biden, and other “senior White House officials” are lojacked? It makes sense that they’d be wearing/carrying something (or is it, as seems likely, an injected RFID chip?) that always gives their location in case of kidnapping, medical emergency, etc.

But here’s the kicker: The device is obviously giving off a signal, which is how it can be tracked, and that signal could theoretically be intercepted by unauthorized parties. And it could probably be blocked, faked, etc.

One of the main objections to Obama keeping his BlackBerry is that the signal could be used to track him. Now that he’s keeping it, he’s trackable in two ways. Undoubtedly, strong measures have been taken to prevent his trackability via the BlackBerry or the monitoring device. But in the case of the latter, it’s supposed to monitor his movements. Its whole purpose is to let certain people know where he is at any given moment. Thus, the signal can’t be completely blocked because then it would be useless.

More questions: Who besides Emanuel is authorized to have the receivers showing the real-time location of the country’s leaders? How many receivers are there?

{EDIT: Title of post was updated to include “New Yorker” on March 3.}

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