John W. Whitehead provides yet another prophetic commentary on what is already another weapon in the biometric surveillance arsenal. Wearable SMART devices that track and report individual health data in real time are already here in the form of Fitbits, SMART watches, SMART rings,and even SMART patches to name a few. Now RFK Jr., head of HHS, is encouraging all Americans to purchase and wear one of these biometric tracking devices for “health reasons” which conveniently aligns with this Admin’s push to expand warrantless biometric surveillance. The omnibus One Big Beautiful Bill Act has thus far been the largest federal investment and expansion of biometric surveillance infrastructure in U.S. history. It not only expanded the use of Autonomous Surveillance Towers (ASTs) equipped with sensors for facial recognition, gait analysis, and predictive behavioral models, scaled up mobile biometric tools, like facial recognition integrated into real-time field operations, and appropriated $6.168 billion for modern surveillance, biometric, and screening technologies: it also imposed a 10 year moratorium on state and local biometric privacy laws eroding state’s 10th amendment rights and our 4th amendment rights. The promotion of wearables would add yet another route for big business and big government to side step our Carpenter rights. Since the data collected from these devices are stored on a cloud that the end user does not own and since this health data is not protected by HIPPA, third party apps and services can access this health data and use them for whatever purposes they see fit. Companies already sell wearable data to third parties, such as advertisers or insurance companies, without explicit user consent. There is nothing stopping DHS from buying this data from those third parties as well which, as I pointed out in The Merger of State and Surveillance Capitalism, they already do with cell site location data. If autonomous surveillance towers became as ubiquitous as FLOCK automated license plate readers, they could integrate with wearable data (e.g., through location tracking or biometric cross-referencing), creating detailed profiles of individuals’ movements and health behaviors. Wearables track location via GPS or Bluetooth, which could be cross-referenced with AST data (e.g., facial recognition or vehicle tracking) to map an individual’s total physical movements. If wearable data were combined with AST tracking (e.g., facial recognition or license plate data), it would enable the government and corporations to create comprehensive surveillance profiles, linking health behaviors to specific locations and activities at which point we will have slipped into Bush’s neo-fascist dream of Total Information Awareness.

Sources:Brown University Center for Digital Health

The Rutherford Institute