Undulating Ungulate

I first blogged about the possibility of this back here; now it’s coming.

U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi’s biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.

“A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.

Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – will let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents. These labs are expected to be deployed across Iraq in early 2008.

Yeah, and the data collected previously will naturally be as infallible as all the other data gathered in the “war on terror”.

Far out. The machine says you die, you die. And wait until it’s just a robot with a gun and a license to kill matching irises and fingerprints.

Of course, it would never happen here, and who the hell cares about those damn towelheads anyway?

(via Cryptogon, my new favourite website.)

Filed by billy at 10:35 am under technology
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