Watch Your Step, They Might Know It Is You

I was looking up a rumour I heard about the New South Wales police when I stumbled across this. It is on a site detailing tenders put out by the police force.

Sometime in 2004, Australia hopes to be issuing passports biometrically linked to the legitimate holder, with an embedded chip holding biometric data for facial recognition, or possibly fingerprint or iris scanning, for live comparison with the person presenting.

Other biological identifiers include computerised facial recognition, palm prints, the iris patterns of the eye, audio visual speech recognition, analysis of keystroke pressure patterns, signature recognition and even a Pentagon-sponsored radar system to check the way people walk ("radar gait signature").

www.tendersearch.com.au...

The radar gait signature interested me and I looked into further. It is fairly interesting in regards to many applications. Some scary, some amazing uses for this technology are possible.

Some of the positive applications include medical diagnosis and early detection of some problems based on a change in, and a great way to study how an individual walks. There is speculation it may help in keeping track of arthritis and osteoporosis in sufferers for example.

Some of the applications I am unsure about are unsettling, especially as the technology moves forward and becomes more advanced.

Imagine a world where not only is your face picked up by CCTV cameras where ever you go. No worries we live in that world already I hear you say.

But imagine you obscure your face to avoid Big Brother knowing your every move. This technology would make it possible in the future to identify you by the way you walk.

This part is a long way off but it will happen.

At this moment it is mainly been invested in by security agencies to tell when someone may be walking suspiciously. Like repeated patterns in the same space may indicate 'casing' a place for instance.

Here is a simple article about the security implications:

www.sciencenetlinks.com...

Some of it would be effective and useful to keep the populace safe, yet it also could be used by a government, security or military in an unethical way.

There is no consensus yet over whether ultrasound or microwave is better yet.

This research paper is for ultrasound
www.ece.jhu.edu...

Though this one favours microwave
72.52.208.92...

This one even favours infra red
spie.org...
spie.org...

However this is the most in depth and well explained (though very technical)
webcache.googleusercontent.com...:roZOZV_hgQcJ:174.129.230.62/journals/asp/aip.389716.pdf+radar+gait+signature+police+nsw&cd=2&hl=e n&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a

These papers span about eight years so this technology is still going through the research and development phase, still might be a long way off for widespread use.

So to summarise this developing technology has it's pros and cons like most new tech.

I hope it just get's used for it's pros though.

Hope this wasn't too much to get through but it is very interesting if you do.

Cheers,
Pabs

If you have ever watched the TV show "Numb3rs", you will see that they have used this ID tech on that show to do a number of things. While the TV show is based on the FBI tracking down terrorists, killers, kidnappers, bombers, etc, the evolution of such tech could be applied to basic human tracking.

Biometric type scanners are good to a point, but in no way unbeatable. It is possible to beat those with minor augmentations, such as contacts for retinals, latex finger/palm print copies, special clothing for heat sensors. It is even possible to beat a vocal analysis with audio distortion tech.

Beating a gait tracker system would be as simple as consciously altering your steps, such as the difference one would commonly make on a crowded sidewalk or when in a marching formation. Posture changes, length of steps, angling of the instep, curvature and pitch of the toes...all of these will change the way your walk. To a computer that is tracking specific points in a pattern, it would change an identity with each pass.

It is an interesting evolution and I know that governments want to perfect them (to the best point possible), but I also worry that it is just another way for them to spy on the normal daily lives of innocent civilians.

Pablos I thought you might find this old thread of mine to be interesting....
www.abovetopsecret.com...