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Pentagon has a laser that can identify people at a distance by their heartbeat
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoSure this is cool and could certainly reduce the demand for "signature strikes" (not that we should be droning people as often as we are in the first place) but it sounds like yet another thing we'll be seeing big city police departments using to enhance their dragnet 10yr from now.
- drawnwren 7y agoIt won't require a warrant because you were beating your heart in public.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoI would think there are some aspects of your heart's behavior that are not ordinarily public.
- qseraserasera 7y agoYou can volunteer with a wearable heart monitor
- akeck 7y agoGait plus heartbeat plus... It doesn't take much make a unique identification: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/96321 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/96321
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoDaisy chain enough non-unique ID's together and you get something that's close enough to unique for the purposes of the people who will be implementing this. While the guy who's getting droned or the dude getting the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of cops may care about identification, the people doing those things don't really care as long as they get the right guy often enough compared to the wrong guy.
- lostlogin 7y ago> the people doing those things don't really care as long as they get the right guy often enough compared to the wrong guy. I’m not sure that’s always accurate. The infamous “We don’t do body counts” episode comes to mind.
- m463 7y agoIt's kind of like browser fingerprinting. A font list plus a list of extensions plus... who needs, uh, fingerprints?
- na85 7y agoIt bothers me that browsers leak info like a font list and extensions. Specify the font you want to display, and if my browser doesn't have that font it should fall back gracefully, perhaps with a warning.
- wlesieutre 7y agoIf you allow a page to specify a font, the page can tell whether you displayed that font or the fallback by looking at things like the size of a div containing a particular character. Preventing font fingerprinting means limiting font use to default system fonts and web fonts only. If a page can use user installed fonts, they can tell whether or not those fonts were installed. Safari’s fingerprint protection does this already, I don’t know if other browsers do.
- 7y ago
- Tharkun 7y agoWhy do they even need a laser? You can use a simple webcam to get an HR reading from the face. Here's an article from half a decade ago: https://www.geek.com/apps/measure-your-heart-rate-using-a-webcam-and-your-forehead-1552180/ https://www.geek.com/apps/measure-your-heart-rate-using-a-we...
- nvrspyx 7y agoCan you get an HR reading from a webcam 200 meters away (about 2 football fields) and through clothing?
- spyder 7y agoProbably with a good lens.
- deepnotderp 7y agoThe military and various intelligence agencies have done an extraordinary amount of research on ultra-long distance facial recognition, and it turns out that it requires gigantic, super expensive lenses from a long distance. This method is much easier.
- 2_listerine_pls 7y agoflat lenses already exist.
- nashashmi 7y agoEven if the face is covered?
- vnchr 7y agoFaces can be obscured or disguised. Gaits can be adjusted. Heartbeats...maybe caffeine pills could be used to avoid identification?
- 7y ago
- fit2rule 7y agoI saw a demonstration of this technology a few years back, at a European military-industrial contractor for which I worked. It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads. When I later saw that biometric information was being harvested by the same company at airports around the world, I figured - time to get a different job. So I quit. And now, the tech of individually-targeted assassinations is coming to market.
- thrwo34234 7y agoThis reminded me of http://autonomousweapons.org/ http://autonomousweapons.org/
- fit2rule 7y agoYes, this is all too real to me. What is really scary though, is just how much support the idea of autonomous weapons has in the military-industrial sector - it seems that everyone is working on similar programs. The most shocking angle of all, is how willing people are to build this technology - like, the cool factor overrides any moral or ethical issues, and even bringing up a question of ethics around these technologies will get you segregated from the 'cool hunter' classes...
- shrimp_emoji 7y agoI'm down for it. There's no stopping acceleration. And war, especially modern war, isn't a human task. Humans are bad at it, and it's bad for humans. Cool, precise machines though? No fear, no boredom, no hunger, no sleep. What's not to love? And it's chic and cyberpunk af. They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.
- supergauntlet 7y ago> And it's chic and cyberpunk af I actually can't think of something more cyberpunk dystopia we-are-the-bad-guys than mindless killing machines that uphold imperialism. > They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though. Damn it, this is a joke that I misread, right? Surely you're not serious?
- pavel_lishin 7y agoI wonder what methods exist to alter your heart's distinctive rhythm. Presumably if you had a pacemaker installed, you could tinker with it (albeit at great risk.) But could I alter my heart's signature by taking medication?
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI think it might be easier and less dangerous to try and fool this particular technology by vibrating your clothing to mask the signal.
- kjaftaedi 7y agoIt probably wouldn't be overly difficult to make simple clothing that renders these lasers useless.
- Timothycquinn 7y agoIf the scanning system has a database of your regular pulmonary patterns, can't this be used, albeit crudely, to detect the emotional state of a subject? With automation I can't help but think that this is unfortunately going to bring George Orwell's dystopian vision closer to reality.
- davemp 7y agoConsidering that polygraphs are mostly a sham, I'd say no, these couldn't be used to detect emotional state.
- roywiggins 7y agoPolygraphs supposedly detect intentional lies. That seems much harder than just trying to get a general sense of "are they relaxed or anxious", "are they happy or sad."
- pharrington 7y agoThe sham related to polygraphs is trying to divine some correlation between a person's instantaneous emotional state and the veracity of their communications. The biometrics polygraphs measure are very real.
- jerf 7y agoYou don't even need a database of pulmonary patterns. The human baseline and deviations from it is plenty strong enough for crude emotion state detection. See also https://news.mit.edu/2016/detecting-emotions-with-wireless-signals-0920 https://news.mit.edu/2016/detecting-emotions-with-wireless-s... (using wifi to detect heartbeat) , https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs231a/prev_projects_2016/finalReport.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs231a/prev_projects_2016/fin... (various video-based methods) , https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/ (and see the video), and a lot of other things. The paranoid in me wonders if this isn't released because it's irrelevant now, since even in the civilian world with civilian technology the "laser" would seem to be nearly superfluous.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
- d--b 7y ago> [facial recognition] needs good, frontal view of the face, which can be hard to obtain, especially from a drone. Yeah, well having a drone flying at 200 meters from the target while aiming what must be a heavy laser is not exactly a piece of cake either.
- MiroF 7y agoisn’t that like... what drones do? and why heavy?
- theandrewbailey 7y agoDon't military drones fly at extremely high altitudes?
- leereeves 7y agoDifferent kind of drone. In addition to the unmanned bombers that fly at high altitude, the military also has low-altitude surveillance drones like: https://www.avinc.com/uas/view/raven https://www.avinc.com/uas/view/raven
- jcims 7y agoIts not that tricky. Look up zenmuse z30 test videos on youtube.
- ikeyany 7y agoDoes anyone know where I can find a nice lead breastplate?
- scarmig 7y agoThen you can bask in the joy of the anonymity of being the guy who walks around with a breastplate.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMy boys wore chainmail in high school routinely. Everybody got used to it easier than you might imagine.
- GrinningFool 7y ago> My boys wore chainmail in high school routinely. Interesting - mind if I ask why?
- m463 7y agoI would imagine it's for historical accuracy.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThey made some of it; were very interested in SCA etc.
- mratzloff 7y agoWhy?
- winrid 7y agoOkay I'll take the bait. Why?
- sailfast 7y agoI kind of imagine that the targets folks are looking for would likely be wearing body armor a significant percentage of the time as a precaution. I wonder if this always requires the chest as a target area or if you could also focus on other exposed areas like the neck to calculate this... I hate that I even have to think about this.
- diydsp 7y ago> He claims that Jetson can achieve over 95% accuracy under good conditions Isn't it critical to state how many signatures are in the database when quoting an accuracy? 95% accuracy among 4 different heartbeats is much easier than 95% accuracy among 2^32 heartbeats, many of which will resemble one another.
- decko 7y agoCould be that it's configured with a single signature, and it can determine a match with 95 % accuracy
- avs733 7y agoif I run eonugh t-tests thats better than an ANOVA
- spiderfarmer 7y agoAlso "under good conditions" is not very convincing.
- vmh1928 7y agoWhile the article and the other comments are about military uses this could also be used for physical access security instead of finger or iris (or badge.) The next question would be if there is a way to spoof someone else's heartbeat signature. Maybe a flat panel speaker playing a recording of the other person's heartbeat. Good morning Mr. Phelps.....
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoBiometrics makes a terrible authentication system. Sometimes there's not much more than 8 bits of state there. Your garage door opener is more secure.
- rhacker 7y agoBiometrics has always scared me. The thieves will take your finger for a fingerprint scan, your hand for a hand scan, your head for a retina scan.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoThis requires your heart to actually beat so the pros and cons on both sides are different: A thief can't steal your heart. A thief could still threaten your life. You can't repudiate your heart. If you get a heart transplant, at first the 'system' might not have a workflow for changing your expected heart signature.
- sumnulu 7y agoSome of them can steal: - Jesse James - Bonnie and Clyde - Arsene Lupin - Lupin the third
- JimBrimble35 7y agoSure this is a neat toy, but where are they going to get data on _everyone's_ heart signatures to make this practical. That's not going to be eas... Looks at Apple watch.. looks at fitbit.. looks at Samsung phone with heartbeat monitor.. huh
- killSelfNow 7y agoThis is what makes suicide rates go up. People kill themselves to avoid living in a world like this. This is what does it. You can just keep going and see what comes next... Or you can kill yourself today, and escape this shitty world as fast as possible, before they get a chance to clamp down harder.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/obIpd http://archive.is/obIpd
- Gene5ive 7y agoWow the new Fitbit sounds very accurate.
- debt 7y agoA Scanner Darkly comes to mine. A suit that's able to game all this surveillance tech: gait masking, face scrambling, heartbeat obfuscation.
- trhway 7y agomay be Pentagon will just use it to remotely monitor the health of the soldiers or soundness of the defensive fortification structures ... Reminded about remote diagnostics using camera https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mit-algorithm https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mit-algorithm "The algorithm can find subtle changes in motion and amplify those, too. By pointing a camera at an artery, we see the imperceptible beat of a wrist become a pounding great pulsation that's straining to burst out of an arm. The rise and fall of a breathing chest can also be turned up. MIT computer scientist Fredo Durand predicts that his algorithm will be used primarily for remote medical diagnostics. He also imagines that structural engineers could borrow the tech to measure the way wind makes a building sway or deform slightly."
- lichenwarp 7y agoBob Lazar knew about this in 1920
- reaperducer 7y agoPentagon has a laser that can identify people at a distance by their heartbeat Ha! Joke's on them. My ex says I don't have a heart! Seriously, though. Imagine the medical diagnostic possibilities of something like this. Not this thing exactly, obviously. But something that won't kill people.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throw20102010 7y agoI looked through all the comments but still haven't seen an answer to an obvious limitation(that is posed near the end of the article): Where are they getting their library of heartbeats from? I'm sure the CIA is collecting, but being able to positively ID someone with their heartbeat is useless unless you already have a verified record of their heartbeat. Imagine the case of finding an elusive person (such as Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden), somebody has to go collect a verified sample BEFORE an assassination takes place. But if you are in a position to collect a sample of someone's heartbeat and you KNOW that it's the right person through some other verifiable means (you need to know if you actually got OBL instead of a body double), then what does this really get you? You already had some trustworthy source, and you can probably use this previous source to verify that you assassinated the right person. So this heartbeat ID tech may be more accurate and robust compared to facial recognition, but it's less useful in actuality. We already have verified pictures of most adults in the world via passports and driver's licenses and such, which makes facial recognition a ton more useful in real life. The problem that this heartbeat tech "solves," the ability to ID someone with great accuracy, is hamstrung by the fact that the elusive people we have the greatest need for an ID like this won't have their data available. For non-elusive people we can already find them by getting their picture and address out of a database. But you can bet the CIA realizes this limitation and will work diligently over the next few years to get heartprints of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and other notorious figures at every public appearance so that they can slowly build a library that will be useful down the road.
- 1-6 7y agoHmm, I wonder if my Apple Watc...
- aiyodev 7y agoI see people are pointing out the 95% accuracy. I think it’s worth reminding everyone that the current American criteria for killing people with drone strikes requires that they 1) be male and 2) appear from orbit to be above a certain height. There’s no requirement to have someone on the ground to pick out targets or make sure afterwards that the right person was killed.
- wumms 7y ago> This works though typical clothing like a shirt and a jacket (though not thicker clothing such as a winter coat). Will wearing a winter jacket (e.g. in airports) still be legal in a couple of years?