Smart Dust and Human Chattel
From The Sunday afternoon podcast with Greg Reese by Hosted by Greg Reese of the Reese Report
April 30, 2026 · 5 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the implications and technology behind Smart Dust, a military-funded project for surveillance and biometric data collection.
The Smart Dust project was funded by DARPA for military applications — specifically for rapid deployment of defense sensor networks onto the battlefield. Battlefield sensing is inherently about detecting people who don’t know they’re being detected. The invisibility and undetectability are deliberate design priorities. This technology appeared in the public with US Patent 11,354,666 B1, “Smart Dust Usage”, which was filed on May 26, 2016, and granted on June 7, 2022. It is assigned to Wells Fargo Bank and describes a system for authenticating a user making a payment using “smart dust.” Smart Dust is technically known as MEMS, microelectromechanical systems, and is comprised of what are called motes. A mote is a single, self-contained micro-sensor node. Each mote measures one cubic millimeter or less, and is roughly the size of a grain of sand. These ‘motes’ are released as clouds, with thousands of sensor nodes simultaneously sampling the target from multiple angles and positions. The Biometric data being collected includes: location, facial and body recognition, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, breath rate, voice recognition, and fingerprint scanning. The system is…
People in this episode
Host: Greg Reese
Topics covered
- Smart Dust
- military technology
- biometric data
- surveillance
- privacy
- DARPA
Keywords
- Smart Dust
- biometric data
- DARPA
- surveillance
- military applications
- microelectromechanical systems
- motes
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: DARPA, Wells Fargo Bank
Places: UC Berkeley
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