Advent of another technology wide deployment of which we must delay as long as possible. In absence of rentable cryptographically anonymized telepresence proxies it is provably impossible to completely hide all unique fingerprints of a human, or even a complex mass-produced artifact. Such a composite fingerprint will be impossible to fake and is impossible to change without completely remaking the object of measurement. (Try changing your body odor (MHC is genome-encoded and is the target of the immunosystem), or rewire parts of CNS in control of your motorics). While all current technologies are extremely limited in their capabilities and have a high error rate this is not intrinsic to the principle. Such systems can be eventually made to work sufficiently well for practice. This is being made possible by further falling technology costs in regards to mass fabbing, crunch and cheap ubiquitous wireless. Where's light, there's shadow. Unfortunately, brinistas welcome this development because they idiotically assume that the technology enables symmetrically, or even assymentrically in favour of the governed vs. the government. Their arguments sound superficially convincing to those unfamiliar with the political process and the logics of power flow. This is the reason they're doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Supply the missing part of the argument whenever you see Brinworld meme propagating. Your best angle to delay this is to circulate this information widely, and explain its potential impact to technologically naive. Write (personalized dead tree, no electronic communication) to your political representatives. No technical solution will work in absence of laws making it legal. Once countermeasures are made illegal the development is basically irreversible. Catch it before it's too late. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 01:36:42 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: Privacy villain of the week: DARPA's gait surveillance tech See also: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38775,00.html ---