Biometric Badges

ID badges won't remain gold shields and plastic rectangles forever. As technology advances, badges and other forms of identification will change to forms that we might not even recognize -- that might, in fact, not require that we carry anything with us but our own bodies. This is already coming to pass.

As every doctor and forensics specialist knows, each human body has many unique characteristics. Fingerprints are an obvious example, and so is DNA (more on that later). Another unique characteristic that's unknown to most people is the map of the tiny blood vessels on the back of the human retina. This can be as distinct as the loops and whorls of a human fingerprint, since the branching pattern occurs differently for every one of us. There's even face-recognition software, though that's proven fairly easy to fool (so far).

Taken as a whole, the patterns of fingerprints, palm-prints, retina maps, faces, and all the other one-of-a-kind characteristics unique to each human are known as "biometrics" -- literally, "life measurements." Enter biometric scanners. Biometric scanners have been in use by government agencies and large corporations for several decades, but have only recently become cheap, fast, and reliable enough for general use. Each of an individual's biometric "ID badges" can be scanned into the computer; each produces a unique pattern that is extremely complicated and hard to replicate, but computers are so fast that complicated really isn't a problem. Stare into an infrared eyeball scanner or mash your thumb on a thumbprint scanner, and the system will take a quick look and compare it to the one on file for you, matching up certain distinct points of similarity. If necessary, it can even compare your print or retina to a whole batch of patterns in order to positively ID you. This is how finger- and palm-print matches used by law enforcement work.

Another unique biometric "badge" is your voice. Each person's voice has a unique timber and pitch that a computer can identify. It's hard even for a master impressionist to fool a voice scanner, since just because something sounds right to us doesn't mean it's right down at the level where sound is a series of little invisible squiggles and spikes. To a biometric scanner, though, it's as unique as DNA.

On to part nine :: To Infinity, and Beyond -- The Far Future of Badges :: Back to Index