Via Glenn Reynolds there’s a post up at Strategy Page that suggests that “Smart Dust†may have been used in locating terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was killed by a bombing strike in Iraq last week:
For the last ten years, development of “smart dust” has moved right along. “Smart Dust” is basically very miniaturized electronic devices. This is similar to stuff like RFID, smart cards, EZ Pass and those rice grain size tracking devices you can have injected into your pets. But Smart Dust takes this all to a new level by being small enough to be disguised as dirt, the kind you can pick up in your shoes or clothing. Each bit of Smart Dust can be given a unique serial number that, when hit with an “interrogation signal” from troops on the ground, or aircraft overhead, is broadcast back. Some forms of Smart Dust are believed to be in use in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s also believed that Smart Dust played a role in the recent death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi. In this case, if someone were able to sprinkle some Smart Dust on Zarqawi’s clothing, it would have been a simple matter to track him with great precision.
We’ve equipped each of our dogs with a HomeAgain ID for the last ten years or so. These tiny injectable RFID devices are scannable and a police department or humane organization with an appropriate scanner can scan a lost animal, identify the owner from a database maintained by the manufacturer, and return the animal to its owner. They’re inert and, hypothetically, could be removed but they do have a tendency to migrate so removing them might not be trivial.
Imagine such a device that could be scanned at a distance or that has GPS capability. Such a device injected into a terrorist or applied externally (as suggested in the article) could be part of a surveillance system for terrorists or, potentially, could be used as a targeting device by advanced weaponry. To the best of my knowledge the use of this sort of technology is not prohibited by any international conventions. Perhaps someone will correct me on this.
The fascinating thing about such devices is that merely putting out the story interferes with the decision process of terrorists. They may be betraying each other without any specific intent to do so.
If the story is true it’s an ingenious application of technology; if the story is false it will promote the same effect of making terrorists distrust one another regardless of commitment, friendship, or family ties. This makes meeting and organizing riskier for them and anything that reduces the ability of those who would do us harm to organize renders large-scale attacks less likely.
A scary technology.
Regarding “affecting their decision-making process,” isn’t this type of article and news release aiding the terrorists by cluing them into the fact that they should shower and vacuum more often?
I agree with you, Nezua Limón Joxectla-Smith, that it is a scary technology. Every so often I read discussions of people tagging their children with such things or tagging legal visa holders with such things.
As to showering or vacuuming, that would only be effective with externally-applied devices. And how would one know that one had removed the device?
If an enemy has had a chance to inject you with something, they can track you forever if they can get their detectors close enough.
But the last I heard they were talking about sensors about 1 mm cube or larger. Containing a battery. Grain of sand, not dust. Towell off, comb hair, and change of clothes and it’s gone unless you ate it or got it injected. And passing a signal through your gut is going to reduce the range.
The last I heard the things were battery-powered. They don’t last all that long that way. They make a massively distributed network, which means any time one of them has useful information a lot of them spend battery power.
A few years ago they cost about $50 each, and the prediction was that they’d be down to $1 each in 5 years. So a thousand of them, awake for a limited time, will go down from $50,000 to $1000. Not that useful, yet.
Eventually they could make great sensor fields. You could drop thousands or hundreds of thousands of them into the desert like cluster bombs, along with a few larger base stations. They passively sense footsteps, say. Get the right signal and they wake up and wake up nearby ones, and make a path to a base station which has the power to report it to you. Or without a base station they save the data until you ask them for it.
I doubt we’re quite there yet.
Wow. When do we start tracking our spouses? Or better, how about tracking employees to make sure that they’re not at the ballgame when they’re supposed to be home in bed?
The comment by Nezua was the first thing that popped into my mind also. As I remember, there was a huge raucus from the right-wing when the NY Times exposed the NSA warrantless spying program. At the time, many bloggers accused the Times of treason on the grounds that it had alerted terrorists to intelligence methods. I thought this charge was absurd. But for those who do not, why isn’t speculation about “smart dust” equally out of bounds? Is it acceptable to discuss intelligence methods or not?