Loss of Privacy

Biometric vendors have found a new customer: America’s public schools.  In Oregon, at least 40 school districts have bought into the fingerprinting system as infallible and unhackable.

Jack Adams, the superintendent of the North Santiam School District, said the system does not take a student’s actual fingerprint. “It’s a string, not a fingerprint,” Adams said. “It’s three mathematical pieces of information taken from a student’s finger. It’s stored on the school computer and can’t be used in any other way.”

All parts of a fingerprint is a bit of math.  It is pieces that can be used to create a student’s fingerprint and, yes Mr. Adams, it can be used in many other ways.  The first way is when the police come knocking for your database.

“Some of the parents are worried the government will be able to access their kids’ prints,” Butler said. “But what they don’t realize is that the actual image of the fingerprint is discarded and all that’s used is a number.” The middle school’s new scanner plots points on a fingerprint and then converts those points to an encrypted number, he explained.  That number is used to verify a student’s account, he added.

Uh, yeah.  So, you’re converting a fingerprint into a mathematical process and you believe that hackers can reverse engineer that?  I want to talk to the salesman who sold you this system.  Oh wait, here he is.

Steve Moon, the marketing director of MealTime, a Portland firm that sold the finger-scanning system to the school, rejects that argument.  “All those fears and concerns are based on misinformation,” Moon said. “The data can’t be used to re-create a fingerprint or by police to identify a student.”

I would fall off my chair laughing right now if he weren’t serious about his misinformation.  And it doesn’t matter if the information is kept on a self-contained database somewhere.  It’s still a digital representation of your fingerprint and it’s still hackable!

While we’re at it, who holds the encryption keys?  If the vendor does, then anyone who has the same system can access your system.  If it’s your IT department at the school, how secure is it?  Are they using SHA-1 hashes?  If they are, you still can’t relax because any government agency with a court order can come and get a copy of that database.  How often do they purge the database?

But some parents are opposed to the finger-scanning of minors in schools. They say they’re concerned that the prints their children register with the school could be stolen, misplaced or used for a form of fraud that hasn’t even been invented.

It’s nice to see some parents do get it.  Unfortunately, only 7 of 612 students have opted out of the program at Stayton Middle School.  And for what?

School officials say the new system saves time for the cashiers because they don’t have to write everything down and can just push a button if a child forgets his or her lunch money for the day.

OMG!  Stop the presses.  We can’t have cashiers doing antiquated things like writing on paper!  Okay then, let’s give up our privacy to biometrics so we can keep that lunch line moving people!

“This is biometric data collecting,” said Jann Carson, the associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Portland. “It’s the ‘Big Brother’ theory. The last thing we should do is teach parents and their young children to be casual about turning over personal data, like a fingerprint, just for the sake of speeding up a lunch line.”

Please, for the love of God, wake up and stop accepting this kind of crap.  Stop letting the government take away all that has been fought for.

Kuchou-fuku, a company just outside Tokyo has created air conditioned Jackets and beds. Oddly enough, the company’s name translates into English as “air conditioned clothes.”

Here you can see the jacket being used in an office.

The company claims that this air conditioned bed can be used for up to eight hours and will only cost twenty-four cents per month to use.

Journalist Michael Hanlon tested the military’s latest “secret” weapon, a ray gun that renders the user into incredible fits of pain. Called the Silent Guardian, the ray gun emits focused beams of radiation to stimulate human nerve endings. The result is excruciating pain for the victim.

“It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile. Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury. But anyone in the beam’s path will feel, over their entire body, the agonizing sensation I’ve just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn’t bear thinking about.”

What it amounts to is a way of making people run away, very fast, without killing or even permanently harming them. That is what the company says, anyway. The reality may turn out to be more horrific.

“I have been in front of the full-sized system and, believe me, you just run. You don’t have time to think about it – you just run,” says George Svitak, a Raytheon executive.

In tests, even the most hardened Marines flee after a few seconds of exposure. It just isn’t possible to tough it out. This machine has the ability to inflict limitless, unbearable pain.

What makes it OK, says Raytheon, is that the pain stops as soon as you are out of the beam or the machine is turned off. But my right finger was tingling hours later – was that psychosomatic?

In fact, it is easy to see the raygun being used not as an alternative to lethal force (when I can see that it is quite justified), but as an extra weapon in the battle against dissent. There are more questions: in tests, volunteers have been asked to remove spectacles and contact lenses before being microwaved. Does this imply these rays are not as harmless as Raytheon insists?

What is likely to happen is that your retina is going to be cooked due to the heat if it’s overused. In a short span, it will probably just melt your contact lens onto your cornea. 1/64th inch is more than enough to cause permanent eye damage.

If the police are called to the scene of gathered people, how are they to tell if it is a riot or a legitimate protest? Do you just shoot at everyone and sort it out later? How fair is that to people who are legitimately protesting? If you want to use it against those that might dissent, then how can we call ourselves a democratic society? Don’t like the president? Too bad. ZAP!

While protests that go awry are not the norm in America, how long will it be before this technology is abused, with no proof to the contrary that the protesters didn’t deserve it? Those being protested against or the police are also not known to be honest when sending in others to provoke riots where otherwise a peaceful demonstration would have occurred.

What happens when someone with a weak heart is zapped? And, perhaps most worryingly, what if deployment of Silent Guardian causes mass panic, leaving some people unable to flee in the melee? Will they just be stuck there roasting? Raytheon insists the system is set up to limit exposure, but presumably these safeguards can be over-ridden.

There will be damage with the use of such a weapon. People will have heart attacks or seizures, which can cause death. Others will be so terrified that the psychological damage done could take years to get over. Too much nerve stimulation can also cause excitotoxicity.

How far a jump is it to make the conclusion that this weapon could be used as a means of torture? The taser was introduced as an alternative means to rubber bullets and guns, which can actually kill people. Tasers have been abused. We have seen deaths and serious injuries from tasers. The Silent Guardian can actually kill you without leaving any signs of physical damage. Have we sunk so low that we honestly believe we need such devices?

If the Silent Guardian doesn’t kill you, how can you prove that a police officer or the military has used it against you? After all, the courts lean towards believe law enforcement before they ever believe the common Joe.

The possibility of assassination is also possible. This could range from world leaders to leading sports figures and other celebrities. All results would be that death was an accident.

Isaac Asimov was dead on with his neural whip in the Foundation Series.

This is a weapon of torture against unarmed people. It’s impossible to see it as anything else. If only they had tuned it to emit waves of pleasure instead of pain. Now that’s a weapon that would be more practical.

Now, you’ll have to excuse me while I go learn to make a tin-foil suit to counteract the pain ray gun.

When RFID implants were first introduced, they were said to be good for you because they would help to save lives.  The FDA even said they were safe, so everyone assumed, without researching for themselves, that an approval by the FDA meant there would be no worries.  Now, however, a report from the 1990s indicates that RFID implants are linked to cancerous tumors in lab animals, causing concerns over the safety, and practicality, of human RFID implants in the long run.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

Verichip and Applied Digital Solutions, have stood by their decisions to use the chips, stating that they did not know of the reports and that they have also not had any negative effects of the 2,000+ humans that already have the chips implanted.

“In fact, for more than 15 years we have used our encapsulated glass transponders with FDA approved anti-migration caps and received no complaints regarding malignant tumors caused by our product.”

Curiously, the FDA has refused to comment on whether they knew about the tumors before they approved the chips, however, two weeks after approval, Tommy Thompson left his post at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is under the FDA, and five months later, was a member of the board at VeriChip.

The scariest part of getting tumors from RFID chips is that they are only active for a few moments and at only on a few specific occasions.  What would happen if the chips became ubiquitous to American society?  If you use the chip frequently because society shifts to using the RFID chips for nearly all transactions, then it will only be a matter of months before you get cancer.  Get one implanted at birth and you could be looking at a very short lifespan.

Given that RFID is easily falsified, what is the point in have them implanted to begin with?  You can remove and swap your implant for someone else’s implant.  You can change the data in the implant and it is overly intrusive into your privacy.

While tumors often appear around a foreign object in your body, the thought of, one day, being forced to implant one is repugnant and an ill-thought idea.  You will essentially be telling people that they need this implant and then tell them, “Ha! Ha!  You can have a side of cancer with that too!”

In the end, we desperately need more studies.  There continues to be gathering evidence that RFID chips are dangerous.  America seriously does not need another Aspartame situation on its hands.

Dr. Li Wang of Britain’s University of Warwick has created Warwick Warp, a biometric system that enables the identification of distorted and partial fingerprints.  This new technology is important to biometrics because it has the potential of reducing false positives.

“In real settings, the best algorithms I’ve seen are still talking about an equal error rate of 3 to 4 percent,” said Dr. Venu Govindaraju, director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at SUNY-Buffalo. “In good settings, we’re looking at 0.2 to 0.3 percent.” (The equal error rate is when the sensitivity of a test is adjusted to the point where the proportion of false-positive results equals the proportion of false-negative results.)

To put this into perspective, 3 percent is acceptable for places such as libraries and computer labs, but it is unacceptable for military bases, and various types of security, such as those in place at airports.

Most current technologies focus on what the experts call Level 1 and Level 2 features. Level 1 is the general pattern of your fingerprint (you remember: arch, loop, whorl). Level 2 includes the specifics of the way the contours end and split. The problem is that a host of environmental factors can throw noise into the data. One major noise source is that people mash their fingers onto sensors with varying amounts of pressure, generating non-linear stretching.

Because it is impossible to place your fingers on a sensor the same exact way twice, false positives have been a significant problem in using fingerprint scanners.  Warwick Warp hopes to change that by overcoming the problems of pressure, smudging, and “bent” prints.

Combined with retina and facial scans, Warwick Warp has the potential to be highly successful, especially when used in conjunction with other biometric devices.  With its uses, there will inevitably be privacy concerns over storing so much information about an individual in databases that still are unproven in protecting one’s privacy.  While the concerns are real, and potentially damaging, there’s no guarantee that these will be in wide use any time soon.