Tag Archives: surveillance

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

November 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.

new technology that can screen multiple passengers 25 feet away

Here’s some more information on new airport screening tech (LA Times).

The screening device, which is about the size of an old-fashioned PC computer tower and weighs about 50 pounds, reads the outline of people to reveal firearms and explosives hidden under their clothes.

Unlike the TSA’s existing full-body scanners that bounce millimeter waves off of passengers to spot objects hidden under their clothes, Gramer said, the passive terahertz technology reads the energy emitted by a person, similar to thermal imaging used in night-vision goggles…

As a result, Thruvision boasts that its technology can screen up to 2,000 people an hour and detect a concealed device at a distance of up to 25 feet. Initially, the system can be used in addition to the existing full-body scanners already deployed at airports, but Gramer said the device can eventually replace parts of the TSA’s security screening system.

I think anyone will welcome a more convenient flying experience at this point, but it is somewhat sinister to think of this technology being installed in all sorts of public places, work places, police cars, etc.

more on internment camps in China

A while ago I linked to a Der Spiegel article on surveillance and internment camps in certain provinces in China. This article in Breitbart is the first coverage I have seen of this story in any U.S. press outlet, and all the sources they link to are sources outside the U.S. The only good news is that the Der Spiegel reporters couldn’t seem to find anyone who has returned from the camps, whereas Breitbart actually has. I’m not sure exactly what Breitbart’s motive is for covering the story, but I’ll give them some credit.

body scanners from Total Recall are now a thing

The Los Angeles subway is installing the body scanners from Total Recall (the good 1990 version, not the garbage 2012 remake.)

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person’s body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour…

In addition to the Thruvision scanners, the agency is also planning to purchase other body scanners — which resemble white television cameras on tripods — that have the ability to move around and hone in on specific people and angles, Wiggins said.

Surveillance in western China

Der Spiegel describes the Chinese government’s surveillance of a minority population in the western part of the country.

Beijing is equipping the far-western province with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints — tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace — from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months. Zenz estimates the number to be closer to hundreds of thousands. More precise figures are difficult to obtain. Censorship in Xinjiang is the strictest in China and its authorities the most inscrutable.

Later the article talks about reeducation camps and a point system that rates how “trustworthy” families are.

brain scans can see your mind’s eye

Scientists in Japan now have a brain scan that can recreate an image in someone’s minds eye fairly accurately. This could have positive applications, for example to help the disabled. The security and big brother implications seem a bit ominous though.

As the accuracy of the technology continues to improve, the potential applications are mind-boggling. The visualization technology would allow you to draw pictures or make art simply by imagining something; your dreams could be visualized by a computer; the hallucinations of psychiatric patients could be visualized aiding in their care; and brain-machine interfaces may one day allow communication with imagery or thoughts, Kamitani tells CNBC Make It.

While the idea of computers reading your brain may sound positively Jetson-esque, the Japanese researchers aren’t alone in their futuristic work to connect the brain with computing power.

For example, former GoogleX-er Mary Lou Jepsen is working to build a hat that will make telepathy possible within the decade, and entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is working to build computer chips to implant in the brain to improve neurological functions.

RFID vital signs monitoring

Heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and breathing can now be monitored remotely using a simple RFID chip.

Monitoring the heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate and breath effort of a patient is critical to managing their care, but current approaches are limited in terms of sensing capabilities and sampling rates. The measurement process can also be uncomfortable due to the need for direct skin contact, which can disrupt the circadian rhythm and restrict the motion of the patient. Here we show that the external and internal mechanical motion of a person can be directly modulated onto multiplexed radiofrequency signals integrated with unique digital identification using near-field coherent sensing. The approach, which does not require direct skin contact, offers two possible implementations: passive and active radiofrequency identification tags. To minimize deployment and maintenance cost, passive tags can be integrated into garments at the chest and wrist areas, where the two multiplexed far-field backscattering waveforms are collected at the reader to retrieve the heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate and breath effort. To maximize reading range and immunity to multipath interference caused by indoor occupant motion, active tags could be placed in the front pocket and in the wrist cuff to measure the antenna reflection due to near-field coherent sensing and then the vital signals sampled and transmitted entirely in digital format. Our system is capable of monitoring multiple people simultaneously and could lead to the cost-effective automation of vital sign monitoring in care facilities.

Sounds good, as long as they don’t make us wear these walking through airport security. But come to think of it, that could definitely happen.

a persistent unblinking stare

Blimps are making a comeback. According to The Intercept, they are being used routinely by the NSA for security and surveillance work.

In recent years, airships — or aerostats, as they are formally called — have been a source of major military investment. Between 2006 and 2015, the U.S. Army paid Raytheon some $1.8 billion to develop a massive missile-defense blimp called the JLENS, which is equipped with powerful radar that can scan in any direction 310 miles. (That’s almost the entire length of New York state.) In October 2015, the JLENS attracted national attention after one became untethered amid testing and drifted north from Maryland to Pennsylvania before it was brought back under control. In 2010, the Army commissioned another three airships — called Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicles — as part of a $517 million contract with Northrop Grumman. The company stated that the airships would “shape the future” of the military’s intelligence-gathering capabilities and provide a “persistent unblinking stare” from the sky.