Remember "Minority Report?"
This movie is set in Washington, D.C. in 2054. The city hasn't experienced a single murder in more than six years, thanks to laws that permit police to arrest individuals predisposed to commit homicides, along with mandatory retinal implants in all citizens that make it possible to track citizens wherever they travel.
Is the loss of privacy and the detention of individuals who haven't committed any offense worth a possible reduction in crime? That's the question Minority Report sets out to address, and it's particularly relevant to a new initiative from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designed to predict which of the 400 million people who enter the US every year have "current or future hostile intentions".
Here's the plan: When you approach a border-crossing checkpoint, you will be examined by a battery of lasers, closed circuit TV cameras, eye movement tracking devices, and microphones. The intent is to compile a database of your body itself, with the goal of predicting your future intentions.
If this sounds a little far fetched, it is. But the DHS has now issued a "request for information" in which it asked security companies and U.S. government labs to propose ways to implement this goal. It hopes to deploy the technologies at all U.S. border crossings points by 2012.
The sort of Minority Report type mass screening envisioned in these initiatives is more than a mass invasion of privacy. It's also a mass waste of time and money. That's because only a tiny number of the 400 million people who cross U.S. borders have any hostile intentions against the United States. Screening all 400 million is a waste of valuable resources and, based on similar data mining efforts conducted by DHS, such as the No-Fly List, is certain to result in thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individuals being unnecessarily detained or even turned away from crossing the border.
Is there a better way to accomplish this same objective? Absolutely, and the technology is here, right now. It's to train immigration and border patrol agent to focus on the same speech patterns, eye movements, etc., that the automated system is designed to track. This would not only save billions of dollars and avoid unnecessarily intrusions of hundreds of millions of travelers, but could deployed in a matter of months—not years.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, it's become difficult to travel without subjecting yourself to intrusive surveillance. However, it's still possible to travel privately, and in some cases, virtually anonymously. Click here to learn how.
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Nestmann
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