Smells suspicious

Olfactory surveillance - the monitoring of personal odour - is on the increase. The number of dogs trained in the detection of criminal suspects and substances is growing. But dogs aren't the only tool envisioned for the future. The Home Office is known to have funded at least one study into the feasibility of releasing swarms of trained bees to search out target odours. The US has similar plans for moths, bees, wasps and cockroaches, and Russia has cross-bred jackals with dogs for an enhanced sense of smell. Even yeast has been genetically manipulated to react to molecules of interest to the security services. Companies across the globe are designing and touting "electronic noses", machines that seek to mimic the mammalian sensory apparatus, in an attempt to satisfy new security demands.

Once referred to as the "neglected sense", the science of olfaction is experiencing a resurgence of interest and researchers predict that, in the near future, our knowledge of it will rival that of the visual sciences. Biologist Lyall Watson outlines the pivotal role played by the olfactory system in his book Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Sense of Smell: "There is a general and universal system of chemical communication in which all living things are involved. The result is a coordinated ecological mechanism for the regulation of who goes where, and how many can afford to do so." The security services want to tap into this primordial information, then exchange and use it in border controls and the wars on crime, terrorism and antisocial behaviour. Watson predicts that a heightened olfactory consciousness will enable us to "get to know who the good guys are". The security services seem to think the science of olfaction is already sufficiently advanced to enable them to do this.



Last summer, Der Spiegel magazine revealed that the German police had been collecting human scents from political activists to enable their dogs to trace persons they believed might try to violently disrupt the G8 summit. China has established a "scent bank" of odours sampled from criminal suspects and crime scenes. According to a leaked document, GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, has been evaluating the merits of odour as a means of personal identification.

In Britain, there has yet to be any challenge to the legality of sniffer dog operations. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is adamant that a sniff does not amount to a search and that an indication from a trained dog amounts to reasonable grounds of suspicion for a stop and search. Acpo reasons that because the dog is deployed to "scent the air surrounding an individual person" and indicate the presence of the smell "in the close vicinity of an individual" no search of the person takes place. In this way, Acpo distances the subject from the source of the scent, to justify its denial that the sniff amounts to a search - and then re-links the subject to the scent to justify a tactile search.