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| Terror Networks |
| Is This The Ministry of Silly Walks? |
| 2003-05-19 |
| EFL - Edited for Laughs WASHINGTON (AP) - Watch your step! The Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk, for use in a new antiterrorist surveillance system. Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, the Pentagon has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people. If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, orders a prototype, the individual ``gait signatures'' of people could become part of the data to be linked together in a vast surveillance system the Pentagon agency calls Total Information Awareness. That system already has raised privacy alarms on both ends of the political spectrum, and Congress in February barred its use against American citizens without further congressional review. Nevertheless, government documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that scores of major defense contractors and prominent universities applied last year for the first research contracts to design and build the surveillance and analysis system. In its advice to contractors, DARPA declared, ``The amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.'' One petabyte would dwarf most existing databases; it's roughly equal to 50 times the Library of Congress, which holds more than 18 million books. Conceived and managed by retired Adm. John Poindexter, the TIA surveillance system is based on his theory that ``terrorists must engage in certain transactions to coordinate and conduct attacks against Americans, and these transactions form patterns that may be detectable.'' Other databases DARPA wants to access include financial, education, medical and housing records and biometric identification databases based on fingerprints, irises, facial shapes and gait. Poindexter's plan would integrate some projects DARPA has been working on for several years, including research headed by Gene Greneker at Georgia Tech. At a cost of less than $1 million over the past three years, he has been aiming a 1-foot-square radar dish at 100 test volunteers to record how they walk. (I wonder if these people are having trouble conceiving children now.) Elsewhere at Georgia Tech, DARPA is funding other researchers to use video cameras and computers to try to develop distinctive gait signatures. ``One of the nice things about radar is we see through bad weather, darkness, even a heavy robe shrouding the legs, and video cameras can't,'' Greneker said in an interview. ``At 600 feet we can do quite well.'' And the target doesn't have to be doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk to be distinctive because the radar detects small frequency shifts in the reflected signal off legs, arms and the torso as they move in a combination of different speeds and directions. The researchers are anticipating ways the system might be fooled. (Practicing walking like John Wayne going into a saloon?) ``A woman switching from flats to high heels probably wouldn't change her signature significantly,'' Greneker said. ``But if she switched to combat boots, that might have a difference.'' (And her switching to a micro skirt might make a difference in the gait of guys following her.) At a restricted facility, the technology could warn security officers that an approaching person was probably not an employee by comparing his gait with those on file. ``And we now know how to detect people who are carrying heavy packages, which could include a 25-pound bomb in a backpack,'' Greneker said. Greneker hasn't gotten caught up in the privacy debate. ``We are research and development people. We think about what's possible, not what the government will do with it. That's somebody else's job. And this isn't a weapons system.'' (I would think that it would be easier to tell a terrorist by the way they genuflected vice walked.) |
| Posted by:Penguin |
| #2 If you want more security you have to trade off privacy. There isn't any other way. Biometrics is a hot topic right now, and the best ways of identifying people will in all likelyhood not be the means we as people identify other people. A person's gait seems a good candidate becuase you can measure it at a distance. Ignore the gee whiz! spin on Petabyte databases. There is already an Internet2 up and running and used to access existing databases of this size. BTW, I am hugely optimistic about the potential for biometrics to dramatically improve our security. |
| Posted by: Phil B 2003-05-20 00:45:00 |
| #1 ...On the other hand, John Cleese is probably naturally immune to this technology. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2003-05-20 00:00:48 |