Minority Report: Your Iris Can Now Be Scanned From Across the Room

Biometrics has been coming for a long time, but as it is starting to be adopted everywhere, superficially for consumer verification and security purposes, the envelope is getting pushed as more invasive techniques are being developed and put in the hands of government, law enforcement agencies, and corporations.

Now someone has invented “long range” iris scans. In other words, they can literally scan your iris and identify you from across the room.

Via The Atlantic:

An officer pulls someone over on the side of the highway. The cop sits in the car a moment, runs the plates—they’re fine—and gets out of the car. As he or she approach the driver’s side window, the driver pulls out a gun, shoots the officer, and flees.

This is something close to what happened in Long Island earlier this year, when a Suffolk County police officer was shot during a traffic stop. Unlike the recent traffic-stop shooting in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the suspect in the New York case, police told CBS, was a “known gang member.”

Marios Savvides, a Carnegie Mellon engineering professor, says he’s invented the fix: a long-range iris scanner that can identify someone as they glance at their rear-view mirror. In other words, it’s technology that could potentially identify a dangerous suspect before the cop even gets out of the car.

It is the first effective long-range iris scanner, he says.

So it starts with a justification… and all the positive reasons why we need this technology.

Meanwhile, privacy in our technocratic police state is pretty much extinct.

For all the good these kinds of technologies might potentially do, the downside always seems to vastly outweigh any positives the system can come up with to justify and sell it to us.

Two words: [amazon text=Minority Report&asin=B0035WTJFW].

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