DARPA Has $3.2M to Sniff You Out 223
quackking writes "The Army wants to sniff you out. This fedbizopps.gov link to a DARPA pre-RFRQ tells more. 'The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Technology Office (ATO), as part of the Odortype Detection Program, invites proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes. Total program funding for this effort will not exceed $3.2 million in FY 2003. Multiple awards are anticipated. Proposals are due by January 29, 2003.'"
Intresting stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like a waste of 3.2m (Score:5, Interesting)
I say that nature does the best job, use some sort of animal to sniff a trail, or use a better means to identify a person.
As it is, fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA are much better than smell, and how would you store the signature of a scent in a database?
"subject has a old-man on crack smell about him."
East Germany (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny thing was that it didn't work.
Re:Sounds silly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like a waste of 3.2m (Score:3, Interesting)
Dogs do this all the time -- but HOW they do it is beyond me. They're able to seperate different smells way beyond what a human being can. When I try and ID a person by smell I usually pick up their perfume or detergent instead of their BO, which is nice and all, but if they switch product lines I'm hosed. Dogs on the other hand will smell their BO, their perfume, the funk from their socks, and know the difference between them. At least that's what I hear on the Discovery channel. I've never telepathically communicated with a dog to ask them this first hand; so I'm not 100% sure here.
So, now the trick is to come up with something that can not only measure smell but measure it in a way that it's seperates each of the signatures out into different signals and then IDs them in sme way, shape, or form.
I really think something like this has been a long-time coming. Dogs have been used to track people and identify substances for a heck of a long time. I don't see any "big brother" issues here either, and I'm usually pretty iffy about that kind of thing. Becaues the actual method has been proven (dogs) so long as it's implemented right it sounds great to me. There -is- a bit of a problem with pin-pointing the source of the smell though, and it would even be possible for somebody to "rub off" their smell onto you and signal a false match, but I'd imagine the odds of the latter is pretty rare. Would make for some interesting check-in procedures at the airport...
"Did you pack your own luggage? Has anybody asked you to carry anything on board for them? Have any strangers tried rubbing their stinky bodies up against in an attempt to make you smell like a terrorist?"
Pretty sure if I had a naked middle-eastern man rubbing his body against mine out of nowhere I'd be worried more about getting the fsck away from him than getting ID'ed as a terrorist at the airport.
So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Nazis had Flare... (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.wsws.org/history/1998/jan1998/gdr.sh
"In a country of 17 million, it maintained an army of 200,000 full-time and part-time secret agents to monitor every aspect of the lives of its citizens. The Stasi--or the "nationalised company listen and seize", as it was nicknamed by the people--even collected smell samples from suspicious elements, so it could use dogs to look for them if it wanted to arrest them. The samples were carefully stored in plastic bags. In the Stasi, as in many other fields, efficiency and monstrosity mingled with incompetence."
Stupid government needs to search the databases... (Score:3, Interesting)
In 1990, Pfennig et al. repeated the experiment but fed different groups different diets. So non-kin got the same diet and kin recieved different diets. The result? Tadpoles stayed around those that ate the same material because they smelled the same. So it depended on diet rather than a genetic signature. However, further experiments showed that outside of nature, if the environment was completely identical then they could do some rough recognition but this condition never exists in the real world.
I have huge doubts the government will find a connection here. Before someone says that babies recognize the smell of their mothers, I want to say that is a common myth. Babies recognize the heart beat of their mothers and nothing more. What a waste of time and money.
Re:Intresting stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH I wonder just how useful this would be for identifying individuals with any great certainty. Unlike fingerprints, the genetic sequences of MHCs (major histocompatibility complexes) of two individuals can very well be partially or fully identical (organ transplants wouldn't work otherwise). This is more comparable to identifying -- or grouping -- people by blood typing, and its application would likely not be for e.g. forensic investigations needing certainties approaching 100%. I'm sure it still can have its uses though.
For us damn foreigners, what's a "pre-RFRQ"?
The STASI did this already, (Score:2, Interesting)
When the Berlin wall fell and the STASI archives were opened they found zillions of sealed jars of odor samples taken from "suspects" IE citizens..
How quickly people forget.....
Re:Sounds like a waste of 3.2m (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stupid government needs to search the databases (Score:3, Interesting)
For 12 years I had two essentially unrelated bloodlines. And I found that I could not keep dogs from the two different lines together or they'd fight (even when they didn't fight with their own relatives). Even those of the different lines that were raised together as pups would take a dislike to one another as adults. When I got some dogs from a third unrelated line, BOTH the other lines tried their best to kill them!! OTOH, they tended not to care one way or the other about newly-introduced dogs of other *breeds*. So it wasn't just a "new dog in town" problem.
Second, I've observed that in general, given a choice, dogs will mate with a closely-related dog in preference to one that's not related (whether they know the individual dog or not). With some stud dogs, it's such a marked preference that they aren't at all interested in breeding unrelated bitches -- and act like they don't "smell right".
BTW, contrary to common perception, newborn puppies recognise their dam (or other source of food, if bottle-fed) by touch first, scent somewhat later, and heartbeat *never*.
Re:Smells like an assassination device (Score:5, Interesting)
A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders.
Yet another example of something cyberpunk author William Gibson envisioned many years ago. Quoting the first four paragraphs of his second novel, Count Zero, published in 1986:
About ten years ago, I had a band that was called Slamhound for a little while, until we found out that the name was already taken by an L.A. glam-rock band. Ouch!
Re:East Germany (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why (Score:4, Interesting)
A fairly consistent clue to how good a dog's nose is, is to watch how long it takes the dog to identify a scent. The better the nose, the faster it happens -- the best noses ID a scent in passing and don't even slow down to do it. A dog that sniffs and sniffs before finally deciding what it's smelling, is a dog that has a poor enough nose that it can't quite make out the scent. Kinda like a nearsighted human trying to read a sign that's just a little too far away.
Doesn't even have to be voluntary... maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, etc, etc... not legal advice, blah, blah, blah
Courts have long held that using odors is not necessarily a violation of your fourth amendment right to be free of unreaonable search and seizure (with a few exceptions).
The air around your vehicle, luggage, or other "object" is free to sniff, so drug sniffing dogs and explosive jiffy-sniffers are usable without a warrant. Vehicle "stop and sniff" random checkpoints have run into some trouble, but if you've been stopped by a police officer for some reason (traffic offense), and he suspects the presence of drugs, he can call for a dog, no problem. If said K-9 alerts on your car, probable cause to search is established. I believe the case was United States v. Place in the early 1980s.
Air around your person has been treated a bit differently, since random, agressive sniffing by a dog, without some articulable suspicion, has been considered a "search" by some courts.
There was a case of high school students being personally sniffed, and found unconstitutional... it was B.C. versus Plumas Unified School District. Here's a link with some info: Newspaper article [gctelegram.com] you can probably google for the whole text of the decision.
Based on some of the above cases, this might actually BE unconstitutional, since it's a direct sniff of a person, not an object. You can sniff people without individualized suspicion, but the state has to seriously justify it... minimal privacy invasion, and compelling state interest. However, with the current terrorism problem, and simply having to walk through a gate of some kind to be sniffed (minimal invasion of privacy), this might pass constitutional muster. The lawyers will have their work cut out for them with this one.
Re:It's a PLOT (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Smells like an assassination device (Score:3, Interesting)
How DARPA operates (Score:3, Interesting)
For a time I worked as a contractor on a program in the DARPA ISO (Information Systems Office). A common misperception about DARPA is that they're bumbling DoD idiots who are always running off chasing impossible goals.
DARPA was established specifically to go after high-risk, high-payoff technologies. They know that many of their projects will not result in immediate payoff in terms of useable technologies, but they figure that those technologies which do make it will leapfrog two generations ahead of any competing technology.
That being said, the program methodology at DARPA is oriented toward specific uses of technology. They're not generally interested in creating something just to see if the technology will work.
People also have the impression that the research and development takes place *at* DARPA (the infamous "clones in the basement" episode of the X-Files springs to mind ;-) . The truth is that the project managers work out of DARPA, but university labs, defense contractors, and other organizations do the actual development work. In many cases, "failed" DARPA projects later lead to working technologies, based on the expertise gained during the original project.