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Walk-By DNA Testing
Scott_Marks writes "The New York Times today has an article on a newly-patented device which may make it practical to perform DNA testing (or drug testing, or explosives testing) on anyone walking underneath. This "portal" sucks up some of the millions of skin flakes each of us sheds each day and whips them into your choice of privacy-invading analysis equipment "for detecting the presence of molecules of interest"."
A couple of years ago when I chanced to be in London I went to visit the Houses of Parliament. On my way in I went through a metal detector -- standard stuff -- and then I had to stand for several seconds in an enclosed booth (think phone booth) while some electronics were sniffing at me. The point was to check for molecules of explosives (IRA was more pesky in those days).
Of course, I had to stand still in a small enclosed space... If similar techology is made to work for people just passing through, this is much more scary. I hesitate to call this progress.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
First, of course this the drug war zealot's wet dream. Just install these machines everywhere, catch all who went past a joint-smoking guy, and solve the drug problem by transfering the majority of the population to prison.
Second, the point about fast DNA sequencing is not really relevant. This device could be used to collect DNA cheaply and invisibly (probably cross-indexed with video images of people passing through). Once you've done the collection, you can do the analysis at your leisure later.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I can't wait until this comes out, so I can "accidentally" drop my badly-sealed garbage back full of fertilizer and pulverized poppy seeds underneath it.
Tee hee.
The american people need to vote on what they want more: Freedom or safety.
Well said. Unfortunately, it would appear that most American people are more concerned about safety than freedom, and they are more than willing to throw common sense to the wind when doing this.
A feel-good, spur-of-the-moment resolution is always more palatable for the American people than careful examination and analysis of a complex issue: "Ban guns because guns kill people!" Well, so does red meat and talking on cell phones while driving, just not as dramatically. "Use blocking software in public web facilities. Enact decency laws on web-page content. Internet pr0n will destroy our children!" and the backlash will threaten our freedom of speech. "Hard drives are missing from a national laboratory! Enact new security policies now to punish those unpatriotic scientists!" And highly talented scientists leave the labs in droves as the draconian changes to security policies make their work lives unbearable. And this helps national security how? "Unscrupulous cashiers! Electronics stores now require the customer to show his or her receipt upon leaving the store with the purchased item." A fix to the problem, but the item is legally the property of the customer once the purchase is made, so the practice constitutes unlawful search and siezure.
This new technology is just one in a long string of episodes where Americans will affix a band-aid cure and abridge their civil liberties to prevent something of negligible probability (terrorist bombing that can bypass current safeguards) from occurring.
You can be perfectly safe, more or less, but you'll be living in a police state.
Perhaps we already are.
I was just thinking along similar lines. I know a few people who reload their own shotgun shells and bullets as well as a few muzzle loaders. I'd be surprised if they didn't trigger alarms as a result.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
If you notice, the bit about DNA is just a throw-away at the bottom of the article. The main purpose of this is to scan for explosives residue, something that we already have a way to do very quickly and cheaply (I should know- happens to me every time I got through the airport). It is certainly extensable to taking DNA samples, but until there are some big breakthroughs in fast, cheap DNA sequencing, and the solve the problem of making sure they get the right DNA, this particular device isn't going to be turning you over to the GATTACA police just yet.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Sounds like a cunning idea, but with 100's of people an hour pouring through a portal, wouldn't cross contamination be an issue?? surely there is no real way of telling who really triggered the alarm at a reasonable flow rate of people.. I'd have to see this device in action before I became convinced it'd be practical.
The other problem is prior contaimination, how long do the wrong substances hang sround on clothes/skin. Would you have problems with the fact that someone might have spent the previosu night in a legal amsterdam coffee shop and be covered in THC molecules, or had spent the previous day dynamiting something, somewhere and thus a string of false positives.
As for the privacy/DNA thing, well how long was it going to be before we get a DNA test code thang in our passports anyway. Let's face it if you want to travel then you have to subject yourself to all sorts of official privitations, to satisfy the beuarocratic paranoia, which is the norm in immegration departmetns world-wide. Being DNA tested seems no worse, then having to declare wether you have had an HIV test or not (and failing to get is visa if you have had the test, regardless of outcome).
M
--
Sic Itur Ad Astra
www.gatrell.org
foo
I could see this used in airports to detect smugglers. They would market it as an artificial dog, comparing the machine to a trained drug- or explosives-sniffing dog.
Time to get rid of my skin again!
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
But most DNA ID tests don't look at the whole thing; they simple test certain areas that we know to have high variability among individuals. Unless the DNA test looked specifically at those areas, than they could appear identical under conventional identification procedures.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Someone will just crack this, it couldn't be to hard.
(1)ever heard of a full body wet suit?
(2)ever heard of skin graphics?
(3)put you dog in a wood chipper, then grin everything up into a fine power in the blender, when you walk though one of these things, let a couple hand fulls of your "powdered dog" upinto the vents. There would be some much dog DNS cloggy the machine that it won't get your own "real" DNA
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Won't work. As someone mentioned before, having smoked pot in the past is not illegal as long as you do not have it on your person at the time you get caught. There have to be measurable quantities of drugs on you (think quarters and eigths of ounces, not quarters and eigths of a half mole) for the cops to arrest you. Those limits keep getting stiffer penalties for lower quantities, but they aren't going to be pushing the molcular level anytime soon. It would be a legal nightmare for the police; they would loose as many rel convictions and suffer so many civil rights suits due to false positives and the like that it would be totally impossible.
Yeah, possibly. But if you do that, you have almost no way of correlating what DNA you got from what body passing through the detector. You also increase the cross-polination problem, as you have lots of samples sitting in a collector together for long periods of time. If the sequence is not done fast, you loose what information you might have pulled. You want to go back and sort 5,000 piles of skin cells against the security camera photos of 5,000 identical midwesterners passing through the security check at an airport? Me neither. Also, for security applications (what this thing is geared for right now- it's a bomb detector), there is no value to letting things sit. "Well, plane exploded. Better go sift through our DNA collection and figure out which terrorist group we let through security last thursday". Nobody likes that.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Not that these are actually in use yet, but I can see it someday if we keep going down this path. It seems like we in the U.S. keep giving up more and more of our personal liberties to have a sense of "safety." Americans are whipped into frenzy by the focus of local TV news on sensationalistic crime reporting. Americans believe they are under seige from gun-toting, crack-smoking gangbangers.
There is a real, everyday, easy to do, practical thing you can do: Remind everyone you know that violent crime is at a twenty-year low in this country. Most of you have probably heard this, but you'd be surprised at how often it shocks people you meet. Here's a CNN.com article to link to. (I'm sure there are better ones, but I can't find 'em right now. Or point 'em to the FBI's Universal Crime Reports. Really. Do it.---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
why don't you ask the interviewer if your future supervisor would mind defacating in a jar for you? Just say you have a test for being a jerk. I mean, If they have nothing to hide, it should be no problem, right?
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
(just a lazy man, not a Coward) It's a drip-by-drip process. Americans are, through inattention and carelessness, creating a hellish future, from our current standards. The Drug War is the opening crack for the removal of out civil liberties. And we are doing it to ourselves. Not the Guvmint. Our children submit to testing and searches in schools; and as they become adults they will accept even more restrictions in the name of "safety". The communist menace was the pretext in the last half of the 20th, and drugs and "terrorism" are the excuses of the new century. The interesting thing is, there are no incidents of terrorism in the US to justify the latter. It's all man-on-horseback populism. We are giving up our freedom from search and seizure based on a *perception* of danger, in a time when we are the safest, richest, and best fed people that have ever lived, bar none. It's astounding to me, to realize that the most freakishly fearful people I know are in the safest Burbclaves around Chicago. Oh, and the Drug War... don't seem to recall a country call Drugs. Who is the enemy? Why, it's... US! We've schizophrenically declared war on ourselves, because we ran out of real enemies for all those warriors to fight. South and Central America is turning into a cartelocracy, a war zone, because half of our population likes various narcotics and the other half wants to kill or imprison the other half. Based on non-existent evidence, we have declared the drugs more dangerous than cars, cigarettes, or war. Contrary conclusions are discarded without examination. And because of this insanity, we are going to have cameras everywhere, DNA scanners, uberdatabases, drug testing on demand, and abuse, abuse, abuse. It will happen slowly, too slowly for those not watching to notice. Why am I so negative? Because I've been watching for over 30 years, and it is happening, and I don't see anything stopping it. I can't get a job without chemical testing. You can bet DNA testing will be required someday to weed out insurance risks. Police can stop vehicles at random to find drug offenders. It will only get more intrusive. If you are fighting a war, then you have to fight it all out, no? Why compromise? Especially if you can't possibly win. The Forever War... Even if, optimistically, the cross reffing of DNA db's to other db's is banned, corporate entities will use legal tricks to escape prosecution. They are extranational now, anyway. And the coming admin will be even more disposed to give them what the want, legally (as hard as that may seem) than the current one. Government? Dudes and dudettes, that's not the big problem! Corporations using DNA testing (not to mention morals testing, drug testing, hell, ideology testing) can take away your ability to *work*. Well, not all of them, but enough to make a big problem. That is far away more frightening. Example: a bank could refuse to give you loans based on your projected longevity or susceptiblity to diseases. No house, no car. This ain't a joke. We may not be able to stop it, but we can observe and chronicle it; I'm beginning to think that's all we can do. In the meantime, just live your lives, smile, be happy, and never forget to watch what's happening and comment about it.
In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it.
They have, because while you might not like passing through a roadblock that stops everyone on New Years Eve, it beats the alternative: Police stopping 1)Only every black person that comes through or 2)Every person that looks suspicious (see above, add "poor people", "people with facial hair", "foreigners", and "people under 30")
Random stops on everyone that comes through are a pain. But it sure beats being targeted by security forces because of the color of your skin or the bad rap your belief system gets. I would much rather see every single person that goes through an airport get a DNA or chemical scan than have them target "profiles". The volume of data and the scrutiny involved in tagging that many people is in itself a gaurantee of some privacy (ways to protect privacy: 1) be alone 2) be in a whacking big crowd), whereas only targeting "profiled" and marginalized groups risks everyone's rights (the hangman's story phenomena: eventually, your group is next.)
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I would think there would be sufficient differences in raw vs. residue traces left in or on the body to tune the device to recognize those distinctions.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
- In my passport it says 'British Citizen'.
- I am the legal owner of a 12-bore shotgun, a
.22LR rifle and .375 H&H rifle - all kept in the UK - You're full of shit
Nick-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Something else you can do is to absolutely, 100%, without exception, refuse any employment drug testing on moral grounds. Did you know that the Canadian counterparts of many US corporations DO NOT require pre-employment drug testing because people are much less likely to accept it here?
No job is worth my liberty. Mind you, I'm skilled enough so that finding employment isn't hard, even if I'm picky, and I've told people no before. You'd be suprised how many people haven't even thought about the implications of such testing. Ask WHY! It's like when a cop asks you if he can look in your trunk. Ask him if you can look in his. This usually gets a most suprised look - although, mind you, cops up here don't draw weapons as part of standard operating procedure, either - there's forms to fill out if the RCMP even unholster their weapon.
The reason to do this is that if you don't refuse HORRIBLY intrusive testing (Would you ask a stranger off the street to piss in a cup for you?) then the wonderful DNA test happens next. The tools to give the state supreme power over a ignorant populace are happening, and when everybody wakes up, you won't have any way to fight back.
An old history professor of mine used to have a quote in BIG letters above the blackboard: "Power: It's ain't for the givin', it's for the takin'" (unknown). Words to live by.
..don't panic
Your arguments are unfortunately flawed, and we should work together to fix them, because I share your concerns and aims.
This device isn't "taking a part of you", for the simple reason that you're actually handing it your "parts" by shedding them into the environment. This is unlikely to be considered an unconstitutional "search" on privacy grounds, for the reason that it's non-invasive. Look at the case law: it's constitutional for the government to fly a plane over your fences and peer down at your greenhouse, and police are allowed to search cars exhaustively without violating privacy as long as they don't open the door. A fifth-mendment defense won't work, since no one has been charged with any crime to face, and far more invasive extractions have been sustained (blood/urinalysis tests). Sure, this sort of thing shocks the concious but it doesn't shock enough people's conciouses. Unfortunately it looks like the only way to prohibit this sort of thing on a constitutional level is either to overrule a lot of precedent (yay!) or pass a constitutional amendment.
PS, not all abusive governments have been overthrown.
PPS, civilization isn't advancing. It's just getting more tech-happy.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Honestly, scanning your identity this way is about the last thing you should be worried about. The main goal of testers like these is to be able to scan people rapidly, like the metal detectors at airports. They want to be able to tell if someone is trying to smuggle bombs or drugs onto an airplane. That means that you need to know the answer from your test now, not in an hour or two when the guy's already had a chance to pass his stuff to some third party.
At the present, and for the forseeable future, it's just not possible to make a DNA-based individual ID in anything like real time. Even in the lab with nearly ideal samples doing that kind of thing takes time, and a lot of that is not something that can be easily reduced; certain chemical and physical reactions take time and can't be sped up. That puts a pretty strong damper on using this as a DNA vacum to violate people's rights.
OTOH, you can bet that the war against drugs and the war against terrorism will be used as excuses. Pretty soon you won't be able to get on a plane without being subjected to a battery of tests to make sure that you're not trying to put anything illegal onto the plane. Oops, you're a mining engineer who uses explosives at work? Prepare to be hassled every time you try to fly. Your pot smoking brother came over to visit? Prepare to be stopped and have your luggage examined. In the long term those kinds of minor erosions of personal protection are a much more dangerous threat to privacy than some hypothetical DNA screening.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
In the world of paranoid Gattacca ranting, maybe. In the real world, no.
There is no way at this point to take a person's DNA and sequence it for anything but a few major genetic diseases. No relevance outside of insurance. All the talk of knowing if someone is "prone to X" from their DNA is years in the future. Here and now, all the applications lead to less discrimination. Examples -
Sniffing for drugs. Don't pat down the long haired guy, just run everyone through the same doorway.
Guns, explosives, etc. eliminate "intuition" (often really means built up prejudice) as a reason to demand a frisk or strip search.
IDing someone. What we can do with the DNA today is (maybe) search for a specific individual who left tissue at a crime scene. Scan for the actual person, as opposed to police in a new york town who went with a two word description (black male) and stopped and harrassed avery black man (and some black women) they found in public areas. (true story, read about it in the wall street journal.)
Leave the paranoia behind, and try to think about how the technology can improve or damage security work in the real world. I think it sounds great for increased sercurity in some areas with decreased invasion of real privacy.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
...without singling out individuals according to race or other characteristics
Once you're scanning someone's molecules, DNA, or whatever, wouldn't this allow for more types of discrimination not less?
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
As with all scientific advances, this throws up a whole load of interesting situations...
Depending on how sensitive and correct this device is, I can see some being installed in London, UK. Mention "terrorist" in England and you get some pretty draconian legal powers (such as extended questioning periods etc) to use and abuse.
So these are set up at airports... "To trap the terrorists"
Then set up at train stations... "To trap the terrorists"
Then set up at tube stations... "To trap the terrorists"
Before you know it, the terrorist threat has disappeared. Do they remove these machines? Hell, no lets have them sniff for drugs/homosexuality/Linux!
Think I'm paranoid? Then on my way to work, how come I drive through 3 manned police CCTV cameras left over from the "anti terrorist" Ring of Steel?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
This is precisely what is described by "Illegal search" (and maybe even seizure, as they are effectively taking pieces of you as you walk by). In a perfect world, I doubt this would stand up in court, as the "due process" required has to be done on an individual basis, not on a broad scope of mostly innocent people.
What kind of people use their engineering talent to make such things? I would refuse. People do not see the long term cyclical nature of government. Everyone should take an Ancient Western Civilization class. Watch how the ancient civilizations grew, became strong, then became oppresive, then were overthrown for the greater good of humanity. This stuff will only prolong the suffering of humanity when the current civilization's time has come, making it difficult for the cycle to advance to the next level. Instead we end up in a totalitarian, invasive sitiuation.
Don't forget the children who have to live in this world we create...
On the other hand, this is a nice approach. No blowing air up your skirt/kilt, no wrecking your hairdo. Just pause for a moment under the box, while natural convection reveals your chemical secrets.
You could do on-the-fly drug screening for anything that gets stuck in scalp flakes, for example. The device can find THC byproducts as readily as THC, so look for this at a high school near you....
tc>
tc>
Most Americans don't understand science, and they wouldn't like it if they did.
test
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
They tried a primitive version of this sort of thing in Vietnam, using chemical and vibration sensors on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The sensors were defeated by hanging buckets of urine next to chemical ones and driving cattle past the vibration ones. Methods of jamming modern versions are left as an excersize for the student.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
simply BAN the cross referencing of a DNA database with public info, like for instance, your social security number.
It's too late. We in the US (and to an even greater extent, Great Britain) are already taking DNA samples from arrestees. If history is any indication, it will soon be required, much as fingerprints are, from police applicants, military, civil service employees, people registering a gun, etc. The attraction of this technology to a government bent on 'helping' us will make its adoption inevitable.
What if I sprinkle you with coke in an elevator?
If this dystopia were to really come about, how are you going to get on that elevator with that coke? Every public building will have a monitor, so you won't be able to enter. Even if you could, how would you avoid getting it on yourself?
Ok, paranoia aside, there was an interesting program some years back in which paper currency was to be tested for cocaine residue. The theory was that if residue was detected, whoever was passing that currency was likely engaged in the drug trade. The trouble was that, when they actually tested the currency, virtally all of it had cocaine residue. I suspect that any monitoring program would have some of the same vulnerabilities; any 'bad stuff' they're looking for already permeates the environment to such an extent that the alarm bells would go off constantly. How do they know that these are your skin flakes? Since they 're everywhere, other people's are presumably also all over you. It may be a while, if ever, before we get to the point where these monitors are practical. At least, let's hope so.
I bet everyone on /. will be going "Yay! New technology!", but we have to worry about one thing: What happens next? An evil corporation buys a 2x2 foot block of ceiling somewhere and gathers DNA. It then correlates the DNA to your e-mail address, home address, and SSN (if it can get it). Corporations now have a perfect way of identifying someone perfectly -- After all, DNA doesn't lie, does it?
It does. Remember, it can't tell what it's gathering or where it came from. It would be trivial to walk underneath one of those things and shake a vial of someone else's dandruff over its sensor. Voila! You have an effect similar to the cypherpunk/cypherpunk registrations on annoying news sites. Suddenly, this Evil Corporation has one John Smith on 31337 Haxor Lane, New York, NY walking into its store several times per second. It's "Hack life" on a whole new level.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
The alternative is a true big-brother police state, wherein you are tracked, measured, and sampled at unknown intervals.
Frankly, I like a Microsoft-like licensing scheme for my own DNA.
Given such an invasion of privacy, I find it sardonically amusing that people would get upset about the idea that various institutions would have access to the logs of their email, ATM/Credit card/bank transactions, millions of security cameras recording their movements in both public and private places and detailed teachers' accounts of their behavior from K-12 in public schools, let alone getting upset about sampling their DNA as they walk by a few scattred detectors.
Seastead this.
Sad but true.
While I feel the threat of terrorism is seriously overblown, it might seem reasonable to use these in airports to search for explosives. However, the potential for this device for searching for drugs underscores the urgent need to completely eliminate the insanity of Prohibition.
Burris
There is a good quote from Ben Franklin on the subject of freedom vs safety.
[warning]I may not have the EXACT wording but it will get the point across.[/warning]
"Those who are willing to give up essential liberty in exchange for safety deserve neither the liberty nor the safety."
I think this hits the nail right on the head. If the population of the US is stupid enough to choose temporary solutions to problems in order for a little safety now by giving up their liberty then they deserve to lose both when the temporary solution fails.
Now before people go and flame me about this, I am a US citizen and I am very unhappy about the idea that the general population is giving up my freedoms for temporary safty. I am unhappy with it, but in this representative democracy the minority in the general populous loses. The minority that is the representation generally wins, see missle shield program.
There was another reply with a small exerpt from the Los Almos disk drive incedent that I would like to comment on. It isn't that hard to keep a log of who checks things in and out, if you work with rms then you would know that it isn't that much of a bother, and quite useful if you are looking for the drives. Also, if the information was as important as they say it was, they should have a survalence camara there. Even 7-11 has camara and I know that those Little Debbie Snacks are no where near as important as nuclear secrets. This isn't about freedom vs safety this is about common curtacy, responsability and national security.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
On top of reminding everyone that violent crime as at a 20 year low, remind them that Washington DC has banned the possesion firearms within the city limits and it has the highest murder rate in the country.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
You americans have an opportunity to make a real stand here, and it will solve the problem of people spying on your DNA - simply BAN the cross referencing of a DNA database with public info, like for instance, your social security number. If your DNA cannot be used to identify you, this won't be a problem from the standpoint of raw information collection for marketting purposes (although might be valid statistically, for instance, all the caffiene molecules being secreted through the pores of coders in the development building.. heh heh)
As for explosives testing.. the american people need to vote on what they want more: Freedom or safety. You can be perfectly safe, more or less, but you'll be living in a police state. But, this is something the country will decide, personally, I'd rather live in a rural setting where the man doesn't have as many rights to get on my land.
The drug issue is worse though, and it's why I'll never move to the US. What if I toss a couple grams of an illicit substance in your car and then call the cops? What if I sprinkle you with coke in an elevator? The shit will hit the fan, and with the way the US drug laws work currently, your life is over and you very well might lose your car, if I phrase my "anonymous tip" correctly.
Something to think about..
..don't panic