“There’s no X-marks-the-spot. There’s no place you have to stand. Anywhere between six and 12 meters, it will find you, it will zoom in and capture both irises and full face,” he said.

Carnegie Mellon describes a whole host of functions for the scanner beyond just police use. It could replace government IDs at the airport and elsewhere. Like other types of biometrics, it could replace a laptop’s login system.

As a sector, biometrics are undoubtedly important. Many security experts believe that passwords—and the security regime that accompanies them—are fundamentally broken. Savvides, for his part, sees biometrics as one more method of human-computer interaction. And near everyone would like to reduce traffic-stop murders.

Yet there’s something threatening about long-range iris scanning. Identification to a degree comparable to finger prints, at a distance, is not something our social habits and political institutions are wired for. Check this image, which a Carnegie Mellon spokesman sent to me and encouraged me to use:

Carnegie Mellon

Okay, this is hella creepy! Imagine this with the genders reversed: an adult man checking out some ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. This cartoon, too, is just weird:

Carnegie Mellon

I don’t mean to ridicule these images: It’s just not hard at all to imagine sinister applications of this technology. If Savvides’s invention works as well as he says it does, governments could scan the face of everyone walking on a city block. It could algorithmically identify a disguised political activist walking down a city street, driving a car, or passing through airport security.

When I asked Savvides about the security and privacy implications of his long-range scanner, he said there were other threats he considered much more serious. “I always hear the same thing, ‘Oh, well now I can be tracked with biometrics,’” he told me. “There’s no need to do that—it’s too expensive.”

“People are being tracked, their every move, their purchasing, their habits, where they are every day, through credit card transactions, through advantage cards—if someone really wanted to know what you were doing every moment of the day, they don’t need facial recognition or iris recognition to do that. That’s already out there,” he said.

It’s a little strange to cite the threat of corporate surveillance when talking about iris scanning, because the concept’s most famous appearance in science fiction is … corporate surveillance. In the film Minority Report, advertisers use iris scanners to serve personalized billboards to people as they walk by, which call out to them by name: “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now.”

I proposed a different hypothetical to Savvides: What if a political activist, trying to flee a repressive regime, was identified by his or her irises and apprehended?