While the theater over the NSA’s spying continues in Congress, under the grand illusion that a piece of legislation will stop the agency, the spooks at the NSA are now tracking people based on the way they swipe their smartphone screen.
The new technology can identify you from the way your finger swipe strokes and text on a smartphone screen, according to Lockheed Martin who designed the identification technology on the agency’s behalf.
Such links to the military indsutrial complex show just how powerful the forces in favor of spying are: Spying is big business for defense contractors. With massive ‘black’ budgets that do not face scrutiny, defense contractors like Lockheed can get lucrative contracts with little oversight. This means they have every reason to push for more illegal spying on the American people.
John Mears, a senior Lockheed IT and Security Solutions executive, told NextGov that Lockheed Martin called the technology a “secure gesture authentication as a technique for using smartphones.”
‘Authentication’ also mean ‘identification’. If the agency has access to your phone, which it does, it can build a fingerprint of the actual user of the phone.
The sneaky identification technology, dubbed “Mandrake,” analyses the curve, unique speed and acceleration of a person’s finger strokes across their smartphone’s touchscreen.
“Nobody else has the same strokes,” Mears stated. “People can forge your handwriting in two dimensions, but they couldn’t forge it in three or four dimensions.”
“Three is the pressure you put in, also to the two dimensions on the paper. The fourth dimension is time. The most advanced handwriting-type authentication tracks you in four dimensions.”
The agency initially played with smartphone-swipe recognition technology in an attempt to move past passwords and have something more secure.
But the NSA is not commenting on how exactly it is using the new technology though Mears did confirm that NSA is actively deploying the technology right now. That means it is already part of its global surveillance program to spy on innocent people.
Combined with the latest revelation that the agency planned to hijack Google and Samsung app stores, which we covered here, to infect smartphones with Spyware, such technology would be the perfect compliment to determine who is actually using the phone rather than just who owns it.
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