a trail of DNA and data

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20454-2005Apr2?language=printer

A Trail of DNA and Data

By Paul Saffo

Sunday, April 3, 2005; Page B01

If you're worried about privacy and identity theft, imagine this:

The scene: Somewhere in Washington. The date: April 3, 2020.

You sit steaming while the officer hops off his electric cycle and walks up
to the car window. "You realize that you ran that red light again, don't you,
Mr. Witherspoon?" It's no surprise that he knows your name; the intersection
camera scanned your license plate and your guilty face, and matched both in
the DMV database. The cop had the full scoop before you rolled to a stop.

"I know, I know, but the sun was in my eyes," you plead as you fumble for
your driver's license.

"Oh, don't bother with that," the officer replies, waving off the license
while squinting at his hand-held scanner. Of course. Even though the old
state licensing system had been revamped back in 2014 into a "secure"
national program, the new licenses had been so compromised that the street
price of a phony card in Tijuana had plummeted to five euros. In frustration,
law enforcement was turning to pure biometrics.

"Could you lick this please?" the officer asks, passing you a nanofiber
blotter. You comply and then slide the blotter into the palm-sized gizmo he
is holding, which reads your DNA and runs a match against a national genomic
database maintained by a consortium of drug companies and credit agencies. It
also checks half a dozen metabolic fractions looking for everything from
drugs and alcohol to lack of sleep.

The officer looks at the screen, and frowns, "Okay, I'll let you off with a
warning, but you really need more sleep. I also see that your retinal
implants are past warranty, and your car tells me that you are six months
overdue on its navigation firmware upgrade. You really need to take care of
both or next time it's a ticket."

This creepy scenario is all too plausible. The technologies described are
already being developed for industrial and medical applications, and the
steadily dropping cost and size of such systems will make them affordable and
practical police tools well before 2020. The resulting intrusiveness would
make today's system of search warrants and wiretaps quaint anachronisms.

Some people find this future alluring and believe that it holds out the
promise of using sophisticated ID techniques to catch everyone from careless
drivers to bomb-toting terrorists in a biometric dragnet. We have already
seen places such as Truro, Mass., Baton Rouge, La. and Miami ask hundreds or
thousands of citizens to submit to DNA mass-testing to catch killers.
Biometric devices sensing for SARS symptoms are omnipresent in Asian
airports. And the first prototypes of systems that test in real time for
SARS, HIV and bird flu have been deployed abroad.

The ubiquitous collection and use of biometric information may be inevitable,
but the notion that it can deliver reliable, theft-proof evidence of identity
is pure science fiction. Consider that oldest of biometric identifiers --
fingerprints. Long the exclusive domain of government databases and FBI
agents who dust for prints at crime scenes, fingerprints are now being used
by electronic print readers on everything from ATMs to laptops. Sticking your
finger on a sensor beats having to remember a password or toting an easily
lost smart card.

But be careful what you touch, because you are leaving your identity behind
every time you take a drink. A Japanese cryptographer has demonstrated how,
with a bit of gummi bear gelatin, some cyanoacrylic glue, a digital camera
and a bit of digital fiddling, he can easily capture a print off a glass and
confect an artificial finger that foils fingerprint readers with an 80
percent success rate. Frightening as this is, at least the stunt is far less
grisly than the tale, perhaps aprocryphal, of some South African crooks who
snipped the finger off an elderly retiree, rushed her still-warm digit down
to a government ATM, stuck it on the print reader and collected the victim's
pension payment. (Scanners there now gauge a finger's temperature, too.)

Today's biometric advances are the stuff of tomorrow's hackers and clever
crooks, and anything that can be detected eventually will be counterfeited.
Iris scanners are gaining in popularity in the corporate world, exploiting
the fact that human iris patterns are apparently as unique as fingerprints.
And unlike prints, iris images aren't left behind every time someone gets a
latte at Starbucks. But hide something valuable enough behind a door
protected by an iris scanner, and I guarantee that someone will figure out
how to capture an iris image and transfer it to a contact lens good enough to
fool the readers. And capturing your iris may not even require sticking a
digital camera in your face -- after all, verification requires that the
representation of your iris exist as a cloud of binary bits of data somewhere
in cyberspace, open to being hacked, copied, stolen and downloaded. The more
complex the system, the greater the likelihood that there are flaws that
crooks can exploit.

DNA is the gold standard of biometrics, but even DNA starts to look like
fool's gold under close inspection. With a bit of discipline, one can keep a
card safe or a PIN secret, but if your DNA becomes your identity, you are
sharing your secret with the world every time you sneeze or touch something.
The novelist Scott Turow has already written about a hapless sap framed for a
murder by an angry spouse who spreads his DNA at the scene of a killing.

The potential for DNA identity theft is enough to make us all wear a gauze
mask and keep our hands in our pockets. DNA can of course be easily copied --
after all, its architecture is designed for duplication -- but that is the
least of its problems. Unlike a credit card number, DNA can't be retired and
swapped for a new sequence if it falls into the hands of crooks or snoops.
Once your DNA identity is stolen, you live with the consequences forever.

This hasn't stopped innovators from using DNA as an indicator of
authenticity. The artist Thomas Kinkade signs his most valuable paintings
with an ink containing a bit of his DNA. (He calls it a "forgery-proof DNA
Matrix signature.") We don't know how much of Tom is really in his paintings,
but perhaps it's enough for forgers to duplicate the ink, as well as the
distinctive brush strokes.

The biggest problem with DNA is that it says so much more about us than an
arbitrary serial number does. Give up your Social Security number and a
stranger can inspect your credit rating. But surrender your DNA and a snoop
can discover your innermost genetic secrets -- your ancestry, genetic defects
and predispositions to certain diseases. Of course we will have strong
genetic privacy laws, but those laws will allow consumers to "voluntarily"
surrender their information in the course of applying for work or pleading
for health care. A genetic marketplace not unlike today's consumer
information business will emerge, swarming with health insurers attempting to
prune out risky individuals, drug companies seeking customers and employers
managing potential worker injury liability.

Faced with this prospect, any sensible privacy maven would conclude that DNA
is too dangerous to collect, much less use for a task as unimportant as
turning on a laptop or working a cash machine. But society will not be able
to resist its use. The pharmaceutical industry will need our DNA to concoct
customized wonder drugs that will fix everything from high cholesterol to
halitosis. And crime fighters will make giving DNA information part of our
civic duty and national security. Once they start collecting, the temptation
to use it for other purposes will be too great.

Moreover, snoops won't even need a bit of actual DNA to invade our privacy
because it will be so much easier to access its digital representation on any
number of databanks off in cyberspace. Our Mr. Witherspoon will get junk mail
about obscure medical conditions that he's never heard of because some direct
marketing firm "bot" will inspect his digital DNA and discover that he has a
latent disease or condition that his doctor didn't notice at his annual
checkup.

It is tempting to conclude that Americans will rise up in revolt, but
experience suggests otherwise. Americans profess a concern for privacy, but
they happily reveal their deepest financial and personal secrets for a free
magazine subscription or cheesy electronic trinket. So they probably will
eagerly surrender their biometric identities as well, trading fingerprint IDs
for frequent shopper privileges at the local supermarket and genetic data to
find out how to have the cholesterol count of a teenager.

Biometric identity systems are inevitable, but they are no silver bullet when
it comes to identity protection. The solution to identity protection lies in
the hard work of implementing system-wide and nationwide technical and policy
changes. Without those changes, the deployment of biometric sensors will
merely increase the opportunities for snoops and thieves -- and escalate the
cost to ordinary citizens.

It's time to fix the problems in our current systems and try to anticipate
the unique challenges that will accompany the expanded use of biometrics.
It's the only way to keep tomorrow's crooks from stealing your fingers and
face and, with them, your entire identity.

Paul Saffo is a director of the Institute for the Future, a forecasting
organization based in Silicon Valley.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]