November 17, 2004

Tech Files are video reports examining popular topics about technology and the Internet. Links to helpful Web sites are listed. Mike Goldfein reports from the Belo Washington bureau.

STORY
New technology may soon make it possible to keep track of anything, anywhere, including you. It is calls Smart Dust — tiny sensors that can communicate with each other wirelessly — a project first dreamed up by the military to get information from the battlefield, but some are warning that Smart Dust may signal the end of personal privacy.

Here's Mike Goldfein:

In the heart of California's Silicon Valley, the next big thing is also the next really small thing.

"These are the world’s smallest wireless sensors. You can stick them up everywhere. You can wear them. They are conveniently the size of a watch." — Sam Godwin, Vice President of Crossbow Technology

They call them Smart Dust.

"[It] has a microphone, an accelerometer, a sounder, and a temperature and humidity sensor." — Godwin

Scatter them 250 feet apart, and they will form their own wireless network — not unlike a spider's web. They live on their own for years, gathering a freakish amount of information that gets passed on to whoever owns them.

Smart Dust was first designed for the military. Commanders wondered whether it might be possible to crop dust enemy lines with millions of networked wireless sensors too small to see and too numerous to destroy but smart enough for our soldiers to know ... well ... everything.

"To track personnel, to look for the enemy, to detect where a gunshot is coming from, that's possible and happening now." — Mike Horton, CEO of Crossbow Technology

Smart Dust was invented at the University of California in the late 90s, thanks, no surprise, to a Pentagon contract and research professor Kris Pister.

"I coined the name Smart Dust to describe where all this was headed. So this little thing — a little smaller than a grain of rice — was able to sense and think and talk and listen." — Kris Pister, CTO of Dust Networks

Smart Dust has enormous potential to do well as a high-tech inexpensive way to monitor pipeline safety, security perimeters, nuclear power plans, systems on ships, vibration on bridges and children at daycare centers.

All technologies have a potential dark side, and privacy experts warn Smart Dust is no exception. Imagine life, they say, when cities are coated with wireless sensors.

"The potential for in-depth monitoring brought by these sensor networks is astounding." — Kevin Bankston, Electronic Frontier Foundation

In the futuristic movie Minority Report, even billboards seemed to know the identity of people passing by.

How would they know your identity? Radio Frequency ID chips. RFID may soon be in drivers' licenses and passports — even consumer items like clothes.

"These chips can be read and can be read without your knowledge. By reading them, people can get a unique number which means you can be tracked using them."

And RFID can be read — no surprise — by Smart Dust

"[The ability to] track everybody, track everything said and log it all with the storage available that is a concern." — Horton

And if not the government, then businesses can trade information about where you are, what you are wearing, what you eat and how long you stay in any one store.

"This is like when you are walking around and someone is following you everywhere you go and writing it down and storing it and probably selling it to someone," — Bankston

But others say most of that is already possible thanks to credit card records, cell phone logs and security cards.

"If you think it is going to enable people to invade privacy in ways they have been unable to do before, that is not true." — Pister

A world coated in Smart Dust sensors may be years away, but it is suddenly possible for an invention that could save us from oil spills and keep our children safe to also someday put Big Brother on every lamppost, bridge and window ledge.