Iris scanning is already in use around the world. In the United States, police have scanned the irises of prisoners in custody for at least four years. “We have everybody in orange jumpsuits, so everyone looks the same. So, quite literally, the last thing we do before you leave our facility is we compare your iris to our database,” a spokesman for the Plymouth County jail in Massachusetts told Reuters in 2011.
Around the same time, the Indian government began scanning the iris of every citizen in order to assign them a Unique Identification Number, which they must have to receive certain government benefits. The United Arab Emirates has scanned the iris of everyone entering or leaving the country for more than a decade.
These existing technologies, though, only worked at close range. In fact, iris scanning has been defended in the U.S. so far because it seemed impossible to use it discreetly. You’d know if your irises were getting scanned.
“It requires a level of cooperation that makes it very overt—a person knows that you’re taking a picture for this purpose,” the CEO of an iris-scanning technology said in the same 2011 Reuters story.
If it succeeds, long-distance scanning will change all that. Savvides says his team has secured a patent for his invention and will continue to work to make it easier and cheaper. He continues, too, to look for positive implementations of it.
“Hollywood has done such an amazing job of stigmatizing iris [scanning] negatively,” he told me. “I develop technology, and the goal is, how can this help society? How can I save a life?”
Article Appeared @http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/05/long-range-iris-scanning-is-here/393065/