Privacy, Big Brotherism, and Civil Reaction

[Eugene Leitl]

On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Bill Humphries wrote:

> On Tuesday, July 3, 2001, at 12:35 PM, Jeff Bone wrote:
>
> > Scenario 1:  people begin wearing masks at all times in public to
> > obscure
> > their comings and goings.  This is ultimately not much more than a
> > symbolic
> > gesture, because it's been suggested that people could be "printed"
> > based on
> > characteristics of their motion, how they walk, etc.
>
> c.f. Lisa Goldstein's _A Mask for the General_

Masks won't do as Jeff correctly observed. But extracting higher order
biometrics (gait, mannerisms) will require orders of magnitude more
crunch, whereas a silicon retina-derived device merely gathering face
metrics (few 100 Bytes each)  from every passer-by and sending it in
realtime to a remote matching server is just a few years off.

Much, much worse stuff is in the pipeline. Ultrabroadband not only doubles
as timing, positioning and wireless service, it also acts as blanket
radar. At least the information is there to detect moving objects of size
beyond the trivial, and obtain complete trajectories of each and every one
of them.

Of course, to achive physical anonymity you can use a rented remote roving
proxy, routing telepresence info over a traffic remixer type of algorithm.
It seems, there might be a need for such a service during my lifetime...

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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