Nanobiometrics Will Track You By SmellNicholas West As discussed in How Close Are We to a Nano-Based Surveillance State? back in February of 2011, the next phase of ID will be on the nano scale. DARPA and their contractors have been working for quite a while on making you, not just your personal data, the tracking mechanism. Through a matrix of biological sensors and biometrics, the individual is now set to be tracked, traced and databased with greater frequency and much greater ease. A new announcement from a Spanish engineering firm highlights the direction that is being taken in extracting the most innate personally identifying information possible. We already have iris scans, biometric fingerprinting, facial recognition, voice recognition, payment with vein scans, and proposals for brain scan databases. Now our unique smell is being researched as the ultimate tool for providing ones ID authentication. Nanotechnology for identification purposes already has been introduced in the following ways, just to name a few: Quick to assuage concern over Big Brother, however, a press release from UniversidadPolitcnica de Madrid sees this technology merely as an extension of what already has been used from the beginning just think of it as an electronic bloodhound: The difference, I would arugue, is that the traditional bloodhound itself doesnt have the ability to transmit information instantaneously to an array of databases to be analyzed, stored, and used for future tracking applications by government agencies or private interests. We only need to look at the applications that have been admitted to in order to realize that this type of technology is far vaster in scale than authenticating our ID for our own personal financial security, or for disease detection and prevention. By 2003, the newly opened Department of Homeland Security showed immediate interest inSensorNet, a program spearheaded by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and their strategic partners to research ways to fully integrate nano- and micro-sensors into one overall Internet-like matrix of real-time detection and surveillance. The Department of Defense allocated $3 million to the initiative for the first year, with a projected budget into the billions being allocated over the long term for detection systems. By 2006, Oak Ridge announced that they planned to turn Fort Bragg military base into a prototype for Americas future cities. According to Department of Energy researcher, Bryan Gorman, Any sensor can talk to any application. Just like with the Internet or with telephone systems, it doesnt matter what kind of computer or telephone you have, where you are or what application youre running. The system just works. SensorNet has since morphed into an even more comprehensive system to integrate safety and security measures . . . into the transportation system, which includes concerns surrounding transportation and commerce in the political, economic, or environmental arenas. What we are really seeing with this development of smell ID is what we typically see with creeping surveillance technology: first it is introduced through the potential benefits in the area of disease detection and protection from terrorism, real and financial all voluntary, of course before it becomes a pervasive and permanent (and mandatory) part of the human landscape. The potential for abusing this type of technology by integrating it across currently disparate lines is virtually certain in our currently data-compromised world. Legitimate science must research ways to increase human potential and freedom, not permit it to be used as a system for identification and control by the politically and morally compromised. With the rise of nanotechnology as a federal initiative, we should strongly resist the collection of any part of our life force to be used in whichever ways that government-controlled science sees fit. It is the misappropriation of science and technology that poses one of the greatest threats to our freedom. How much longer can we permit the ethical part of this discussion to become an afterthought, instead of an integral component while beginning this type of research? Recently by Nicholas West: 