Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

July 29, 2011

If you like to walk down the street and just blend into the crowd, you're not going to be happy when you read this July 13 Wall Street Journal article about the rush by police forces across the nation to outfit themselves with a new device that enables them to identify and do a background check on anyone about whom they become curious. The $3,000 Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System, developed by Plymouth, Mass.-based BI2 Technologies, which attaches to an off-the shelf iPhone, enables an officer to snap a picture of a face from up to 5 feet away and do an immediate search to see whether it matches someone from a database of people with criminal convictions. From closer up, MORIS also will scan a suspect's irises and fingerprints and compare those to ones on record. The idea is that by combining facial recognition technology with other biometrics in a handheld device, police will be able to identify someone with 100 percent accuracy.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, A riz., who is planning to equip 75 of his deputies with MORIS devices by this fall, told the WSJ that the new gear could prove to be a potent tool for catching criminals, because it will enable his officers to quickly verify the identity of a person, without even looking at the photo ID that Arizona law already requires everyone to carry under penalty of arrest. He also says it will expose people trying to conceal their real identities with fake IDs. "We are living in an age where a lot of people try to live under the radar and in the shadows and avoid law enforcement," he explained.

From BI2's website, here's a video explaining how it works:

A new mobile device could let authorities identify you electronically.

Keeping People Safe, or Empowering Peeping Toms?

Current state-of-the-art identification devices require a police officer to be conspicuously close to a person to snap his or her photo, and an iris or fingerprint scan can't be done surreptitiously. But as this 2010 article from Consumertraveler.com details, the technology already exists to scan a moving subject's irises from a distance of up to 10 feet, and to scan as many as 30 different individuals in a single sweep, without any of them stopping and gazing directly into the device. Similarly, according to this recent article from Technology Review, a device called the AIRprint already makes it possible to scan a person's fingerprints from up to 6 feet away.

New technology can scan irises from a distance of up to 10 feet.

It's not difficult to envision a day soon when even longer-distance capabilities are bundled together in a tiny hand-held or wearable mobile device that allows authorities to identify secretly anyone or everyone in a crowded crosswalk, airport or shopping mall, run background checks on any or all of them, and upload that data to a cloud database that continuously updates surveillance subjects' locations and activities. It's also hard to imagine this technology remaining solely in government hands. Just as editors and reporters at a certain British tabloid newspaper eagerly hacked into the voice-mail queues of celebrities, politicians and murder victims, I think it's inevitable that tomorrow's professional Peeping Toms will get their hands on such gadgets and put them to uses so unsavory that they might make the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention. The upshot is that pretty soon, everyday anonymity — that is, the freedom to move about without revealing who you are at every turn — will be as quaint a relic as Edgar Allan Poe's mid-19th c entury short story "The Man of the Crowd," in which he describes his protagonist's vain attempt to follow and discover the motive of an elderly London pedestrian who roams the streets seemingly endlessly. As Poe observed:

It was well said of a certain German book that 'es lasst sich nicht lesen' — it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

Poe's amateur gentleman detective finally gives up, concluding that if a man truly is determined to remain a blank slate and simply keeps continuously on the move, there is no way to penetrate the protection afforded by the throng . Similarly, up until recently, it was possible for someone to disappear, take on a new identity and live undetected, sometimes for decades, like the narrator of Bruce Springsteen's 1980 song "Hungry Heart":

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that don't know where it's flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

But no more. And that worries me. Sure, that ability to adopt a new identity, or no identity at all, and to move about without fear of being spotted or tracked was an advantage to criminals, terrorists and the ordinary Joe who wanted to dodge his responsibilities. But it also afforded protection to battered spouses and abused children, political dissidents, and the innocently accused — remember Richard Kimble in the 1960s TV series The Fugitive? There also are plenty of people who, through no fault of their own, have become objects of public curiosity. Combine these newfound scanning and biometric identification tools with global positioning satellites and data-mining engines that can comb through the mountain of electronic breadcrumbs that we leave with our smart phones and credit cards, and pretty soon, we'll all be an open book to anyone who cares to scrutinize us.

So what do you think? Should the use of these identification tools be allowed, or should we put limits on them, for fear of unleashing a privacy-shredding monster? Express your opinion below.

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