Comdex : Invasive technologies don't fight terrorism

IDG News Service - LAS VEGAS - Since Sept. 11, people have been more willing to accept technologies that impinge on their rights because they help us feel safer, author and lawyer Jeffrey Rosen said yesterday.
Speaking at the BioSecurity summit running concurrently with the Comdex trade show, Rosen said that studies about human responses to fear indicate that people will allow invasions of privacy when they are frightened. But databases that track personal information and attempt to link such data to terrorists, imaging machines that look through clothing to screen airplane passengers and biometrics technology aren't likely to help capture terrorists, he said.
"If we knew who the terrorists were, we'd go out and get them," said Rosen, an author on legal topics and an associate professor of law at George Washington University in Washington. "The goal [of such technology] isn't to prevent terrorism, it's to make people feel better."
But it is possible to develop technologies that don't erode privacy or impinge on freedoms and would accomplish the goal of surveillance and tracking, he said.
For instance, the company that created the "naked machine" now in use to screen passengers at Orlando International Airport in Florida is working on a version that would show objects that look like a weapon concealed under clothing, but would scramble the image of the person's body so that the screener wouldn't view a nude image. Biometrics that search for fingerprint or iris matches with known terrorists but are then not kept in any sort of database repository are another possibility, as is general surveillance that blocks faces of those being watched and instead monitors general movements, he said.
Calling Britain "privacy Chernobyl," Rosen said that surveillance there has veered out of control in recent years, with the average person photographed as many as 300 times in the course of a normal day. Cameras popped up in many public places as a response to terrorism and became more prevalent after two young boys were arrested in the kidnapping and death of a 2-year-old. The boys were recorded with the younger boy on a surveillance camera, but it wasn't that technology that led to their arrest -- they were captured after they bragged to friends about what they'd done, Rosen said.
The "most dramatic" recent proposal, he said was the prospect of a Total Information Awareness system. The system "looks something like the British system on steroids" and would create databases of private information that would be combined and would be accessible for government agencies to search through