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Saturday, January 13, 2007
Law - The expanding impact of dog sniffs, drug wipes, and other "pin-point search" capabilities
This article from the January 2007 issue of Reason, written by Julian Sanchez and titled "The Pinpoint Search: How super-accurate surveillance technology threatens our privacy," reports that "The new style of noninvasive but deeply revealing detection—call them 'pinpoint searches'—will require rapid adjustments in both legal rules and social mores." Some quotes:
The original pinpoint search, the drug dog’s sniff, has built-in limits. A German shepherd is a cumbersome piece of biotechnology, making suspicionless sweeps during routine traffic stops the exception rather than the rule. But chemists and engineers are developing a variety of electronic sniffers that are competing to make Fido’s schnoz obsolete.DrugWipes, for example, are small, swab-tipped devices. Wipe the tip along a surface, or a sample of sweat or saliva, and in two to five minutes a simple indicator window reveals whether drug residue is present. Manufactured by the German firm Securetec, DrugWipes have been used by more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. since the late 1990s, and they’re increasingly popular among schools and private employers as well. * * *
[R]esearchers are developing ever faster, cheaper, and more sensitive electronic noses.
Among the technologies in the offing is the desorption electrospray ionization scanner. It uses charged droplets to lift particles from a surface and into a mass spectrometer, which can break down and analyze the components of any substance down to the molecular level. It’s currently a desktop-sized machine, but its creators, a team of researchers at Purdue University, hope to develop a portable version that can fit in a backpack within a few years. The Purdue team’s head, Graham Cooks, guesses such a device might cost about $4,000. That’s not exactly cheap, but it’s thousands of dollars less than a well-trained drug dog costs. * * *
[This long article ends by examining three legal approaches and concluding:] But the debate over how to strike that balance must begin now, before today’s prototype rolls off tomorrow’s assembly line. These new technologies are too powerful to use thoughtlessly. We’re already entering a pinpoint-search world. Now we must decide how to live in it.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 13, 2007 06:04 PM
Posted to General Law Related