in the belly of the fish

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Fingertips

I am taking an economics class this summer and my latest lesson was about protecting oneself from identity theft. Apparently, about nine million Americans every year get their identities stolen. They go around not knowing who they are or why they exist. The government recruits them for scientific research and after being given new identities, these nine million Americans are released into the wild to become a part of the working class and work their way up to have their identities stolen again.

*I am joking about the last part. They aren't released into the wild, they are sent overseas for dangerous medical experiments.

Apart from the provoked confabulation on my part, I was struck with an extremely inefficient idea to prevent identity theft. Instead of sending lengthy emails, delivering documents in the mail, asking for personal information over phone conversations and swiping cards and signing checks to pay, why don't we have all our information on our personalized body features. Since every human being has distinct fingerprints, noseprints and retinal patterns, we should get rid of all of our old identification methods and adopt a new technology with the entire population's distinct feature data in it.

Imagine a machine that combines fingerprint authentication, iris scanning, and noseprint recognition. One of the three would have been weak by itself, but in having three, we would ensure to reduce identity theft to almost zero. Along with reducing identity theft, the machine would also aid in:

  • Creating millions of jobs: By requesting people who can produce the machine theoretically and materially, who can market it, who can manage the data inside the machine, and who can protect the data etc. 
  • Fixing the economy: By reducing unemployment and therefore increasing the money supply in the market and also by inducing safe monetary decisions and transactions as a result of the reduction in identity theft 
  • Reducing air and water pollution: Reduces air pollution by reducing the paper usage and therefore the need for cutting trees. Reduces water pollution by reducing the need for paper recycling centers which use paper and excessive amounts of energy to recycle paper and dump their processed water back into streams that either provide drinking water for people or habitat for marine organisms 
I think, it would also be convenient to add speaker recognition. That way, people would be protected from all sorts of psychopaths. If it were just fingerprints or noseprints, some desperate maniacs would go around trying to chop pieces of people's bodies. When we add iris recognition, although it eliminates losing parts of your body, it puts you in a all-or-nothing scenario in which an unstable minded person may as well deprive you of your existence and drag your dead body to my miraculous machine. So, if I also add speaker recognition (there must be a secret code to initiate a call to 911 and protect the person's account in case someone is holding a gun to their head) then, I am sure people would think it easier to get a job then to steal someone's identity. 


The machine will have all your needed data such as credit card bills, insurance plans, mortgage payments, loans, emails, tickets, passwords, cloud data and so on. To secure all this data a security system needs to be built for the sole reason of encrypting each piece of information and protecting it so it is impossible to access by pure computer hacking talent.

I am still thinking of a name, but I will update if I find one.
Until then,

Lots of TARDIS stickers,
~Belle