More on Smell Samples
Earlier this month, I blogged about a library of people’s smells kept by the former East German police. Seems that the current German police is still doing it:
The Stasi secret police used scent gathering in Communist East Germany, collecting smells in empty jam jars and storing them. The method has reminded Germans of that failed regime of snoopers, and was highlighted in the recent Oscar-winning film “The Lives of Others” about a Stasi surveillance officer.
The domestic policy spokesman for the Social Democrat Party, Dieter Wiefelspütz, finds the new weapon “pretty bizarre.” But he knows that unappetising though it may be, the method has been employed by German investigators for a long time.
In legal terms, recording someone’s body odour is no different than taking their finger prints. It’s covered by the criminal statue book. The scent contains a person’s identity just like the lines of his finger tips or his DNA.
Taking someone’s DNA is subject to strict conditions but the law permits finger printing and scent recording whenever police deem it necessary as part of a criminal investigation—which means virtually always. Erhard Denninger, an expert on Germany’s justice system, has no problem with scent analysis. “It’s harmless by comparison with sledgehammer plans like searching people’s computers,” he said.
Suspects are told to hold several 10 centimeter steel pipes in succession for several minutes each.
There are strict rules governing this procedure. The interior minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has decreed that “persons must contaminate the metal tubes through their hands”, and that the aromatic traces thereby recorded “be secured in glass containers in dry condition.”
It sounds harmless. But a number of defence lawyers, Düsseldorf-based Udo Vetter among them, advise their clients not to agree to scent recording. If the state sniffs the sweat of its citizens, it amounts to a “considerable intrusion into one’s intimate sphere,” he says.
The complexity of collecting someone’s scent is the theme of Patrick Süskind’s novel “Perfume”, recently made into a movie, in which an 18th century murderer wraps beautiful women in cloths which he later boils. Unlike in real life, the perfume specialist chose to kill his victims before taking their scent.
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Henry • August 1, 2007 3:23 PM
Well, the method used now by (west) German police looks kind of similar on first glance to the old one by the East-German Stasi (Ministery of State Security – Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), but in fact the differences are striking.
East-German Stasi build up a permanent library of samples from known dissidents, that could be used in the future to identify objects in their possession of maybe train dogs to search and identify them.
In the new case police took some samples from a small number of identified suspects in one defined criminal case, where they had an object that was touched but did not carry fingerprints or usable DNA-samples. Those samples were used only for comparison with the deposit investigating this one case and destroyed immediately afterwards.