Engineers Who Should Be Horsewhipped; New Tech Edition

Carnegie-Mellon's "CyLab" needs to be melted down.

We have developed a long-range 6-12m iris stand-off capture system that can capture subjects anywhere in a 6-12m capture volume with enrollment quality images.

Oh, nobody there can conceive of the evil fuckery that sort of technology will permit? It's not that they just can ID you from a retinal scan taken at a distance (think of the billboards in the movie Minority Report), they can take a photo of your fucking eyeballs from 40 feet away and then put that into their biometric database.

This is one of the biggest beefs that I have with engineers and scientists: They always are asking "can we do this", but they only rarely bother to as "should we be doing this". No, they just release their new technology into the wild and then they leave it up to the rest of us to deal with the effects of it.

Once this system is ready for use, I don't know what we can do to stop it from being adopted by law enforcement and corporations far and wide. Do you really want to be biometrically IDd when you walk down the street or enter a building? It is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that a database of who you are and where you were at any given time would be accessible to the cops up to the Federal level and damn near everyone else. For sure this technology will be adopted widely in the UK, since they already are pretty much a surveillance state and they don't have any niceties such as a written constitution to get in the way.

They'll have to outlaw mirrored sunglasses. And colored contacts. Colored contacts in your own eye color would probably fuck things up a bit.

I kinda sorta wish that this guy could go visit the C-M CyLab.