Tag Archives: surveillance

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Ubiquitous urinary analysis?

toilet bowl with mobile phoneIf you want futurist thinking that looks at the little things rather than the large, you can’t do much better than to follow Jan Chipchase as he bounces around the world researching how people use things… and how things use people.

Here’s a prime example of science fictional thinking processes applied to that most everyday of objects, the toilet.

… the light blue rinse that you see above is an indicator of what is, ahem, yet to pass. The colour of the liquid in the toilet bowl will be the most commonly used mechanism to feedback relatively minor but good-to-know status updates about the state of your body, a simply chemical adaptation of what many of you already do today. (The critical stuff will sent directly to your doctor/insurance company, so that they can break the news to you gently, unless of course you think you can handle staring down at a blood red toilet bowl).

Given human limitations – whether its remembering which colours are associated with what, to our ability to effectively distinguish between colours, what are the other parameters can will be put into play by tomorrows porcelain experience designers?

Where does this lead to in the future perfect? Lower insurance premiums for your employer when they install (and allow the remote monitoring of) your [insurance company] sponsored washroom. Automated devices travelling the sewage systems monitoring dye pigmentation by sewage outlets of the stars? That you are willing to walk an extra three blocks to use a unmonitored public toilet.

Given the UK government’s seemingly unstoppable obsession with monitoring its citizens and telling them how to live, it’s almost depressing how plausible Chipchase’s speculation seems from where I’m sat right now – even though I suspect it’s meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Insert your own joke about “the power behind the throne” here…

Though it should be noted that science fiction pipped Chipchase to the post on this one; “Alone With an Inconvenient Companion” by Jack Skillingstead (as anthologised in Fast Forward 2) features hotel urinals that provide the protagonist with a ‘complementary urinalysis’. Or at least he thinks they do. [image by jurvetson]

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‘Virtual fence’ at Mexican border to grow

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US/Mexico border at TijuanaThe Obama administration is pushing ahead with the expansion of a pilot project launched by the outgoing Bush gang – a ‘virtual border fence’ of cameras, sensors and communications hardware designed to enable a more rapid response to Mexican illegal immigrants from the Border Patrol.

What is different, DHS officials said, is that they have learned lessons from the technical problems that dogged the Bush administration’s first, 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson. What remains unclear is whether the ambitious technology will encounter fresh setbacks that would embarrass President Obama, who has urged Congress to streamline the immigration system and work out a way to deal fairly with the 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, analysts said

[…]

On Monday, U.S. officials began erecting 17 camera and radio towers on a 23-mile stretch near Tucson, and they expect this summer to add 36 others over 30 miles near Ajo, Ariz. If testing goes well and DHS approves, plans call for covering the 320-mile Arizona border by 2012 and the full border with Mexico — except for a 200-mile stretch in southwestern Texas where it is difficult to cross and expensive to monitor — by 2014.

[…]

The government has made many changes since a $20 million pilot rushed off-the-shelf equipment into operation without testing, relied on inadequate police dispatching software and ignored the input of Border Patrol officers, who found that radar systems were triggered by rain, satellite communications were too slow to permit camera operators to track targets by remote control, and cameras had poor visibility.

It remains to be seen how much of an improvement the new systems will be, but the cynic (and science fiction reader) in me doesn’t find it hard to imagine new methodologies being developed by border-jumpers and those who make a living helping them cross, which will quickly render the new hardware inadequate, if not obsolete. That said, it’s a much less crass and weird idea than allowing unpaid volunteers from around the world make a sport out of border surveillance.

The only way to make any border truly impermeable is to remove all incentive for people to cross it; that suggests to me that all the high-tech gadgets and fences in the world won’t stop people trying to immigrate across the Mexican border with the US. All it will achieve is more deaths, more imprisonment of people whose ‘criminal’ motive is to make a better life for themselves and their families, and more hypocrisy from those who deplore the notion of immigrant labour while enjoying the low costs it provides. But hey – why treat the illness when you can rub snake-oil on the symptoms, right? [via SlashDot; image by superfem]

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Watching the watchmen watching us – metasurveillance in the UK

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bank of CCTV surveillance camerasDubai may be Ballardian, but my own country of residence is becoming increasingly Orwellian – so much so that to say so is becoming a cliche that even the most conservative of media outlets seem happy to use. Here’s the latest development in the Surveillance State: a CCTV system for watching CCTV operators. Seriously. [image by eduardoizquierdo]

The system uses webcam-style cameras trained on the irises of the CCTV operators. From this, software works out where the operators are looking as they stare at each monitor – and the areas they have not been paying attention to. From this it creates a video of what they missed, for them and their bosses to watch at the end of their shift.

If we can’t trust the CCTV operators to catch everything, what’s the point in having them? If you can make a system that can automatically determine what a fallible meatbag passed over, why bother having the meatbag as middleman at all – just repurpose the same algorithmic prowess and make the panopticon fully automated.

Then the next step is obviously to deploy robot policemen, so that when they run amok and start beating peaceful protestors you can blame a software glitch (or maybe anarchoterrorist hackers OMFG!) and be saved the embarrassment of having the whole business dragged through the courts. And hey, why stop there? Let’s automate the judicial process as well – the less time, expertise and effort spent on controlling the proles the better.

If you’re determined to drive all the way to hell, you might as well step on the gas instead of gawping at the bloody scenery.

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A more honest and open society?

networkPaul Carr hits the nail on the head concerning the ongoing hysteria amongst many mainstream journos as to the relevance of Twitter, social networking et al to political culture:

…every time a scandal emerges involving the technology – be it McBride’s email or American teenagers ‘sexting‘ naked photos to each other, we hear the same crap from journalists – that the web, and email and mobile phones are making everyone behave in scandalous ways they never did before. If that’s true then I have some amazing YouTube footage of a bear shitting in the woods, which I found next to a damning video of the Pope taking communion.

…

The only difference between the way humans have been behaving badly for years, and how they behave badly in the internet age is the fact that now there’s always someone else watching.

And that seems to be the key point that politicians and more traditional media sources seem to have yet to properly absorb.

As networked recording devices become ubiquitous we’re going to have to learn to deal with a reduction in personal privacy. Further Carr adds:

…as a generation grows up that has never known true privacy, things will start to change. And they’ll change for the better.

This is something that’s been bothering me recently: like many people I’ve always had the vague idea I can be one person online and another in real life. This idea, however, is false. My generation and every generation hence will go through life leaving a sticky trail of hyperlinks, tweets, and FaceBook photos; an online miasma that everyone will possess and everyone will have to accept.

As privacy is reduced maybe prurient voyeurism and hypocrisy will also diminish. Part of the enjoyment of gossip is the secretive aspect of it: but if everything about everyone is out in the open then there will be no need to fear slur and innuendo.

So maybe the rise of ubiquitous recording and surveillance will lead to a more caring, more honest, and less hypocritical society?

[Paul Carr in The Guardian][image from jonbell has no h on flickr]

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Smart dust, er, dew

Smart Dew electronic bugHere’s another military sf trope to add to the list of fictional gadgets gradually becoming a battlefield reality. This time it’s the turn of smart dust… though the team at Tel Aviv University have called it ‘smart dew’ instead:

Dozens, hundreds and even thousands of these Smart Dew sensors – each equipped with a controller and RF transmitter/receiver – can also be wirelessly networked to detect the difference between man, animal, car and truck.

[snip]

Each individual “dew droplet” can detect an intrusion within a parameter of 50 meters (about 165 feet). And at a cost of 25 cents per “droplet,” Prof. Shapira says that his solution is the cheapest and the smartest on the market.

A part of the appeal of Smart Dew is its near-invisibility, Prof. Shapira says. “Smart Dew is a covert monitoring system. Because the sensors in the Smart Dew wireless network are so small, you would need bionic vision to notice them. There would be so many tiny droplets over the monitored area that it would be impossible to find each and every one.”

Not quite the nanoscopic modular machines of fiction, then, but surely their primitive progenitors. Not to mention another example of military hardware that will litter disputed regions for years to come… somehow I doubt they’ve done much planning about how to retrieve them all once their job is done. [image from linked article]