FC: Privacy villain of the week: DARPA's gait surveillance tech (fwd)

[Eugen Leitl]

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 at well.com>
To: politech at 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

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