I Think I Smell a Rat

By: Alexander Chancellor

Until the other day I had never heard of Graves' disease. It is not a very nice name for an illness. Without its final "s", it would just sound like something serious; with the "s", it carries the aura of death. In fact, Graves is an auto-immune disease that causes overactivity of the thyroid gland with some pretty depressing results - protruding eyeballs, double vision, and breast enlargement in men, among others. But it responds well to treatment and doesn't usually kill people. The treatment, however, has suddenly become a problem, for it involves the use of radioactive iodine. And radiation emitted by the patient treated with this stuff shows up on the detection devices of America's jittery anti-terrorist police. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA), one 34-year-old New York man with Graves' disease returned to his clinic three weeks after treatment complaining that he had been strip-searched twice at Manhattan subway stations and detained by police for questioning. He was very unhappy about this, so the clinic rang the New York Terrorism Task Force to ask if anything could be done to stop the persecution of its Graves patients.

The Task Force recommended that they should carry letters describing the isotope used, the size of the dose, and the date and time of treatment. The letters should also provide a doctor's 24-hour telephone number so that police could check that they were authentic. But as a doctor pointed out in the AMA journal, the patients would still have to wait during this verification process, and he suggested that they might therefore "choose not to use public transportation to avoid this inconvenience".

This little episode made people aware for the first time that radiation detection devices are being installed in New York subway stations, and who knows where else. They are part of an ever-growing panoply of measures designed to thwart al-Qaida. But they are also making life more and more nerve-racking for ordinary citizens going about their daily business. One misunderstanding, and you never know; you might find yourself despatched without ceremony to Guantanamo Bay.

Britain was recently ticked off by the European parliament for eroding civil liberties in its anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S. must be glad it isn't a member of the European Union, for it would doubtless have been much more severely censured than we were. There seem to be no limits on the precautions America is willing to take to stop anything like September 11 happening again.

One consequence of September 11 has been a great leap forward in the development of identification technologies. Leading this work is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon, or DARPA, which I have written about here before. DARPA has recently notched up the dubious achievement of establishing an "Information Awareness" programme, with the purpose of storing everything there is to know about every U.S. citizen on a "virtual centralised grand database".

But that is just one of its crazy schemes. Another one, just revealed in the New York Times, is the development of a sniffing machine that would be able to identify people by their body odour. There are already machines for reading people's fingerprints and scanning their irises. But this is a whole new idea. If, in theory, you got hold of one of Osama bin Laden's old jalabias - perhaps from the dry cleaners in Kabul - you would be able to waft its smell into the machine, which would then recognise it if it ever came across it again. The clever thing is that the dry cleaning wouldn't have eliminated the smell, for this wouldn't be a normal kind of smell - like that of sweat - that is removed by washing, but a smell not normally detectable by humans that is supposedly given off by the proteins of a person's immune system. Mice are supposed to be able to tell from this smell how closely they are related to each other, and thus avoid inbreeding.

It is becoming possible to imagine a world full of ingenious machines that will be able to find out at an instant exactly who you are, whatever your disguise, and then tell the authorities everything they want to know about you. This could be the enduring legacy of September 11. It is not a cheering prospect, and it is one that will probably be of greater benefit in the long run to brutal dictatorships than to democracies trying to protect themselves against terrorism.