New invention to detect money Chuck Oxley
Associated Press
May. 9, 2005 08:15 AM
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho - Federal scientists are perfecting some new inventions designed to detect cash and even trace specific bills as they pass through society.
The effort is supposed to root out drug and terrorism money, but some say it's yet another example of using technology to abuse personal freedoms.
One of the devices sniffs the air for the smell of money - it can pick up a pile of cash from about 10 feet away. Another machine beams electrons through packages or luggage to detect trace metals in the green ink. And a third project under review would actually scan serial numbers of individual bills into a database.
Lead scientist Keith Daum at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho said the purpose of the inventions is to intercept cash that is used in illegal drug or terrorism transactions.
"When Joe the Druggie gets his $20 from an ATM and spends it on a (drug) pickup, and the money is later traced to a drug seller - to me, that's evidence," Daum said in a recent interview.
Daum, along with his colleagues Tim Roney and Gary Gresham at the lab's National Homeland Security Division, work in a room that even "Q" of James Bond fame would be proud of.
Various digital equipment, glass tubes and boxes with dials are strewn around the white-walled, secured lab. A crisscross of steel tracks on the floor and ceiling allows sections of the room to be moved back and forth.
The machines sit unobtrusively on the counter. They're so new, they don't even have pet names yet. But Daum, a short, bespectacled scientist, gleams as he describes how they work.
The cash sniffer is actually a gas chromatograph about the size of a cordless hand vacuum.
Here's how it works: Take a crisp $20 bill out of your wallet and put it up to your nose. That sweet, slightly acidic aroma is actually microscopic molecules of ink and paper landing on the nerve receptors inside your nose.
The device works in nearly the same way, but with much higher sensitivity. Airborne molecules land on a sensor. If enough molecules are detected, the device emits an alert.
Daum said a trained dog can do the same thing - even better - but not consistently and not over a long time.
"It's a game to them, and they get tired of playing the game," he said.
The second device is simply called the "physics-based" detector. About the size of a small airport X-ray scanner, it scans an interior space for elemental metals used in the green ink. Radioactive rays strike the metals and turn into gamma rays, which are then measured by the machine. The more gamma rays detected, the higher the volume of cash bills.
Although the test machine is small, Daum said it could be built large enough to scan a shipping container.
The two machines were developed with a $1 million per-year budget from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They are not in production yet, but are being field tested.
Of course, carrying cash - even large amounts of it - is not illegal; though there is a limit of $10,000 in cash anyone may carry in or out of the United States.
Still, intercepting large sums of money would at least put a dent in the drug trade, said INL spokesman Ethan Huffman.
"Money is always the incentive to bring drugs across the borders," Huffman said. "If we can devise solutions to aid customs and border patrols in stopping that, then that limits it."
The third project, a relatively new device, is on loan to the INL from another agency. It looks like a typical bill counter used by banks to count stacks of cash. But on the back of the machine, an add-on box about the size of a file folder reads and stores the serial numbers of every bill it counts.
The machine is of little strategic value by itself. But if it was distributed worldwide, and if there was a database of serial numbers, it would become possible to trace money across the globe.
That worries people like Melissa Ngo of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"This is just another step toward a complete lack of anonymity," Ngo said.
"There are many reasons people wouldn't want information about where they spend their money," Ngo said. "From stopping mass marketers to people thinking it's nobody's business what books or CDs they buy."
Daum said he expected that some people and groups would oppose the kind of work he was doing, but he has weighed the issue in his own mind.
"I don't like the government getting into everybody's lives either, but we certainly want to stop the terrorism and stop the drug trade," Daum said. "I think we need to have a war on terrorism, this is a part of that; to effectively stop that we have to put up with some of this."