DARPA Has $3.2M to Sniff You Out

quackking writes "The Army wants to sniff you out. This fedbizopps.gov link to a DARPA pre-RFRQ tells more. 'The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Technology Office (ATO), as part of the Odortype Detection Program, invites proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes. Total program funding for this effort will not exceed $3.2 million in FY 2003. Multiple awards are anticipated. Proposals are due by January 29, 2003.'"

Comments

Sounds like a waste of 3.2m

[403Forbidden]

Developing the equipment to identify unique scents would be costly, bulky, and probably easily confused by purfumes and other forms of distraction.

I say that nature does the best job, use some sort of animal to sniff a trail, or use a better means to identify a person.

As it is, fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA are much better than smell, and how would you store the signature of a scent in a database?

"subject has a old-man on crack smell about him."

Re:Sounds like a waste of 3.2m

[Quixote]

not really. all the above mentioned methods require the participation of the identified person Not for eye (iris) scans. Here's an anecdote. 17 years ago, National Geographic published an eye-catching (no pun intended) picture of an Aghan girl in a Pakistani refugee camp. This year, after the fall of the Taliban, the original photographer (Steve McCurry) went back to that region to try and locate her. Well, to make a long story short, he found her; but the verification was done using iris scanning technology (story here). Interestingly, the company (Iridian) scanned the negative of the original, 17-year-old photo and used that to do the iris matching with the current photo of the girl (woman now). But the point is: the iris was captured from a 17-year-old photo.

East Germany

[hrieke]

The Statiz (sp? E. German Secret Police) did something like this once. They would take samples of everything and place it in sealed jars so if they needed to track you with the hounds later, they could in theory open the jar with a sample of your sofa in it and let the dogs loose.

Funny thing was that it didn't work.

Re:Intresting stuff

[Seehund]

No, unless you actually altered or destroyed the detected "scent" molecules, then "masking" your scent with perfume or whatever wouldn't work. That works on organisms with olfactory organs, who can identify a scent as e.g. "banana", but can't tell the difference between minute structural differences between different banana-smelling molecules, if all "banana" molecules bind to the same receptors.

OTOH I wonder just how useful this would be for identifying individuals with any great certainty. Unlike fingerprints, the genetic sequences of MHCs (major histocompatibility complexes) of two individuals can very well be partially or fully identical (organ transplants wouldn't work otherwise). This is more comparable to identifying -- or grouping -- people by blood typing, and its application would likely not be for e.g. forensic investigations needing certainties approaching 100%. I'm sure it still can have its uses though.

For us damn foreigners, what's a "pre-RFRQ"?

Re:Smells like an assassination device

[Teach]

A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders.

Yet another example of something cyberpunk author William Gibson envisioned many years ago. Quoting the first four paragraphs of his second novel, Count Zero, published in 1986:

They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up to him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon like to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International in that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

About ten years ago, I had a band that was called Slamhound for a little while, until we found out that the name was already taken by an L.A. glam-rock band. Ouch!

Re:Why

[Reziac]

Actually, not all dogs have a nose superior to a human. Some toy breeds have a nose that is demonstrably inferior to an average human nose!! In my observation (as a professional dog trainer) Boxers and Danes are about on a par with most pet breeds in the nose dept., but seriously sub-average compared to hunting breeds that have been selected for scenting ability.

A fairly consistent clue to how good a dog's nose is, is to watch how long it takes the dog to identify a scent. The better the nose, the faster it happens -- the best noses ID a scent in passing and don't even slow down to do it. A dog that sniffs and sniffs before finally deciding what it's smelling, is a dog that has a poor enough nose that it can't quite make out the scent. Kinda like a nearsighted human trying to read a sign that's just a little too far away. :)

Doesn't even have to be voluntary... maybe

[The Tyro]

IANAL, etc, etc... not legal advice, blah, blah, blah

Courts have long held that using odors is not necessarily a violation of your fourth amendment right to be free of unreaonable search and seizure (with a few exceptions).

The air around your vehicle, luggage, or other "object" is free to sniff, so drug sniffing dogs and explosive jiffy-sniffers are usable without a warrant. Vehicle "stop and sniff" random checkpoints have run into some trouble, but if you've been stopped by a police officer for some reason (traffic offense), and he suspects the presence of drugs, he can call for a dog, no problem. If said K-9 alerts on your car, probable cause to search is established. I believe the case was United States v. Place in the early 1980s.

Air around your person has been treated a bit differently, since random, agressive sniffing by a dog, without some articulable suspicion, has been considered a "search" by some courts.

There was a case of high school students being personally sniffed, and found unconstitutional... it was B.C. versus Plumas Unified School District. Here's a link with some info: Newspaper article you can probably google for the whole text of the decision.

Based on some of the above cases, this might actually BE unconstitutional, since it's a direct sniff of a person, not an object. You can sniff people without individualized suspicion, but the state has to seriously justify it... minimal privacy invasion, and compelling state interest. However, with the current terrorism problem, and simply having to walk through a gate of some kind to be sniffed (minimal invasion of privacy), this might pass constitutional muster. The lawyers will have their work cut out for them with this one.