May 23, 2007
The Scent of terror
In a reminder of methods used by the East German Stasi secret police, German authorities are collecting human scents to trace activists they believe may try to violently disrupt the G8 summit in June. It's proving highly controversial, and there's no scientific evidence that the method is infallible.
...the 68-year-old left-wing radical had seen it all before. As an anti-nuclear activist he had been investigated a number of times... But the visitors who came knocking Wednesday before last wanted something quite different this time -- his smell.
The elderly gentleman had to hold little metal tubes in his hand for several minutes. They were then labelled and sealed. The aim was to determine whether the ageing revolutionary is planning to disrupt the G8 summit in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm next month...
Taking someone's DNA is subject to strict conditions but the law permits finger printing and scent recording whenever police deem it necessary as part of a criminal investigation -- which means virtually always...
in East Germany... (t)he Communist authorites started researching scent analysis in the 1970s. A criminology student at Berlin's Humboldt University earned his doctorate in 1985 with a study on crimefighting "through traces of human scent."
...The Ministry for State Security had collected hundreds of thousands of scent samples of critics of the regime. The GDR police preferred cotton cloths, which were used to collect the suspects' smells. The samples were then stored in air-tight containers.
The Stasi stole items of clothing from the regime's opponents at their place of work or where they played sport, or they would take the odor sample from chairs they had sat on in the pub or during an interrogation.
But the Socialist dog lovers refrained from using the scent samples as evidence in court. "It couldn't be scientifically proven which components of human smell allow the dogs to differentiate between them."explains Günter Petraneck, a chemist who helped the East German police track smells for years.
...investigators in West Germany felt themselves to be cleverer than their East German counterparts. Olfactory evidence provided by investigators was repeatedly accepted by courts in the Federal Republic.
Gary Beauchamp, the director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, who is working on the Darpa project. ...is convinced that it should be possible to "recognize how old someone is, what their gender is, and what illnesses they have."
"We need a big leap in technology to create sensors that can do the same thing. But there is a lot of work being done on this now. The time has come for this technology."
Smells that can be digitally traced, can also be digitally saved. Even the conventional register of all Germans could be digitalized and, if needs be, matched to every perspiration in the country.
complete article http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,484561,00.html by Thomas Darnstädt, Markus Deggerich, Günther Latsch, Cordula Meyer, Andreas Ulrich
thanks Conscientious
[photo not from above]
Posted by Stubbornson at May 23, 2007 02:59 PM