Noah Shachtman of the Wired blog "Danger Room" has a post up today about an odd project from the US government's Technical Support Working Group, or TSWG:
The research arm of the government's anti-terror fight is looking to for someone to build "a rugged, reliable, and
compact system for canine handlers to collect human scent for future
use to track a specified target."There are similar systems around today, the group notes. But they're "too
large and fragile to be used in an operational environment." TSWG wants a handheld, rugged device to do the job, instead. And the group has laid an exhaustive set of criteria for any contractor looking to build the thing…
Link.
Reader comment: dalvenjah says,
The East German Stasi secret police did something similar. (This link was the first to pop up in a google search) They would collect cloths with the scents of their targets for their dogs, sometimes during torture, other times by breaking into a house and stealing the dirty underwear.
Of course, the TSWG is not doing this for totalitarian or creepy old man purposes at all…
