The best way to survive a bioweapon, nanoweapon, nuclear, or other
attack is to prevent it from happening in the first place. The Lifeboat
Foundation's SecurityPreserver program is looking for ways to provide
early warning of attacks before such attacks can be fully designed,
planned, developed, deployed, let alone launched.
In an ideal world, you would have perfect defenses and therefore would
not need to have early warnings of attacks before they were developed.
The
SecurityPreserver program is for use in an imperfect world with
imperfect defenses. If you wish to help improve our imperfect
defenses, we have
developed many programs that we need your input on including our
BioShield [2] and
NanoShield [3] programs.
2. TODAY
Surveillance technologies are getting smaller every day. The above
Hitachi Mu-chip was first used in admission
tickets for the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi Prefecture. It is also
used in entry-control systems at condominiums. This wireless RFID
technology has already become outdated by chips 64 times as small that
were recently announced by Hitachi
[9].
The X-ray backscatter scanner at London's Heathrow
airport can see through
clothes.
[10].
Wireless sensor networks were originally developed in the mid 1990s at
university research institutions including the University of
California, Berkeley, for defense and intelligence applications. As
the research world rallied around the concept of "Smart Dust" (a term
originally coined by Kris Pister, a Professor at UC Berkeley and
founder and CTO of Dust Networks), universities and research
institutions worldwide started to take a closer look at the impact of
ubiquitous sensing and control.
Three types of wireless sensor networks are already available
today:
Star: Star networks rely on a central base-station that communicates
directly to sensor nodes. Some star networks support multi-hop routing
from node-to-node but all routes are "linear" where each node only has
one possible communication path. The failure of an individual link
means that information is lost. Installation of star networks require
sophisticated site surveys and link-level configuration. Each node
must be positioned correctly and each point-to-point link tuned for
maximum reliability.
Star-Mesh: Star-mesh networks have redundant routing at the core and
star routing at the edge — typically with line-powered routing
nodes and
optionally battery-powered end nodes. In a star-mesh network, the
routing nodes are "full-function devices" and the end nodes
are "reduced-function devices". While star-mesh does provide
redundancy on top of star topologies they do not allow for true end-to-end
redundancy nor do they eliminate the installation challenges of star
networks. While an edge node may transmit to one of many routers it is
still a point-to-point link that must be tuned.
Mesh: Full-mesh networks [8],
sometimes referred to as "mesh-to-the-edge"
provide fully redundant routing to the edge of the network. This has
the obvious benefit of reliability but also has dramatic impact on
network installation and long-term predictability. In a full-mesh
network every device has the same routing capabilities. As it is
installed each node will be able to "decide" where it belongs in the
routing structure based on what other nodes it can communicate with,
its proximity to the network gateway, and its traffic load. This allows
for true self-forming and self-healing without constraints imposed by
device type and architecture.
3. NEAR FUTURE
There is already a trend for increased surveillance as terrorism
threats increase worldwide. This has caused many
advanced systems to be developed.
A system which may be available in the near future is
Smart NEMSbot "Swarms" ORB by
Physical Optics Corporation.
Omnidirectional Robotic Beacon Eye (ORB) is a wireless
optical communication system with a 360-degree field-of-view and at a
15-degree
elevation. This line of sight, near-infrared ORB with light modulation,
transmits an optical, personal signature and survey information. ORB is
miniaturized, requires low battery power and can not be
jammed.
Panoptic C-Thru Surveillance system allows one person to monitor dozens
of locations.
Another system that may be in available in the near future is the
proposed
Panoptic C-Thru surveillance solution
[1]
which enables one or more
surveillance agent(s), using a single high resolution
(auto-stereoscopic) display, to at-a-glance remotely monitor the
security situation of an arbitrarily large number of
locations.
In essence, the system significantly empowers surveillance agents with
something akin to an X-ray-like "God's Eye View" super sight
capability. The agents have comprehensive overview. They can see,
hear and transport their focused viewpoint through walls; floors and
ceilings; can zoom into and monitor a specific location.
An old Star Trek episode comes to life with the
Panoptic Systems C-Thru
3D Video Surveillance System, a way for Big Brother to get a
"god's-eye
view" of everything going on inside a building or plane. Taking input
from numerous 360-degree cameras placed throughout any location, the
system combines all those images into one "auto-stereoscopic" display.
But wait, it gets worse. The company has also implemented facial
recognition software into the system, so it can not only keep track of
where people are, but who they are, too. The surveillance system hasn't
been implemented anywhere yet, but if this is actually practical and
not just some pipe dream, let's just hope it's used for good rather
than ill.
4. ABOUT 5 YEARS AWAY
Israel is using "nanotechnology" to try to create a
robot no bigger than
a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets.
The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet", would be able to
navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable
enemies such as rocket launchers.
The tiny RPV may even be able to launch
miniature rockets at its targets.
Prototypes for this new weapon are expected within three
years.
This same technology can — and likely will — serve as one of
the early pre-PSDS deployment platforms of Panoptic Surveillance
Systems, to be
used in non-permanent engagements limited in time and geographic
space.
Sousveillance as a situationist critique of surveillance. This
wearable device allows you to "watch the watchers".
5. FUTURE
In the future, we propose a SecurityPreserver by means of Panoptic
Smart Dust
Sousveillance (PSDS) systems. Such systems would provide
technologically-enabled "Radical Reciprocal Accountability" and
transparency protecting us from manmade existential risks through
information
— risk-preventing and risk-defusing information through both top-down as
well as bottom-up, pointed, responsible proactive state-based and
citizenry-based intelligence-gathering.
Panoptic means "including everything visible in one view". Smart Dust
would be small nanotech devices the size of a dust particle or smaller
which would be used for surveillance and sousveillance. Sousveillance
is security & safety monitoring and intelligence gathering by ordinary
citizens. Surveillance is security & safety monitoring and
intelligence gathering by those with power, especially
governments.
Much if not most sur- or sousveillance is keeping a watchful eye on
situations. Beyond that, it can also be used for proactive or
investigative intelligence gathering as well as for the coordination of
Command, Control
& Communication — providing the 3
Cs of
tactical
and
strategic
operations.
Democracies empowered by extremely fine-grained and radical reciprocal
accountability, enabled by multiple independent bottom-up parallel
global Panoptic Smart Dust Sousveillance (PSDS) systems, might be
thought of as "Democracies-on-steroids".
Keeping EVERYONE honest would be the primary and overriding goal and
usage of such PSDS systems. Each such system would realize this by
effectively providing the so-called 4 Es to
all:
"Everyone has Eyes &
Ears Everywhere". An example of such a system is
"People's P2P Panopticon (PP2PP)" [7]. This
P2P Community project is aimed at
technologically
realizing transparency and openness. The project calls for the
development by the P2P community of an open-source sousveillance
technology platform funded, developed and stewarded by the global P2P
community... to be implemented and given as a peace-gift to humanity.
A new
international and global security doctrine based on the co-existence of
top-down and bottom-up PSDS systems is
"Multi-laterally Assured
Pervasive Permanent Sur-/Sous-veillance (MAPSS)"
[6] which was
intentionally coined this way so as to replace the previous Cold War
era doctrine of MAD —
Mutually Assured Destruction.
The goal of the
Berkeley Smart Dust project
[5]
is to build a
self-contained,
millimeter-scale sensing and communication platform for a massively
distributed sensor network. This device will be around the size of a
grain of sand and will contain sensors, computational ability,
bi-directional wireless communications, and a power supply, while being
inexpensive enough to deploy by the hundreds. The science and
engineering goal of the project is to build a complete, complex system
in a tiny volume using state-of-the art technologies (as opposed to
futuristic technologies), which will require evolutionary and
revolutionary advances in integration, miniaturization, and energy
management.
Such Smart Dust sousveillance systems are far less
far-fetched than you might think. Precursors of Smart Dust localizer
systems have already been in development since the mid-90's with the
sensor-net-nodes currently already at the millimeter scale. Key players
include
Dust Networks,
Berkeley's
Smart Dust Project [5]
and
Aether Wire & Location.
For further
documentation, Google
on "Smart Dust mote", "localizers", and "wireless sensor networks" and
permutations thereof.
Our transparent future.
5.1 GEOPOLITICS
Could countermeasures to smart dust be developed? Of course. Some
ideas would be:
"Clean rooms" or more likely "Clean buildings" could be developed
that are repeatedly filtered to remove dust particles and which also
employ other
countermeasures against smart dust.
Nanoweapons could be developed that are used to destroy all smart
dust on the planet or more likely in a specified location such as a
country. (They could use GPS to determine what area to protect.)
Communications could be switched to areas much harder to monitor
including using direct mind interfaces with computers instead of using
keyboards.
Luckily all these countermeasures would be fairly easy to detect. The
question is will anyone do anything about
countries/companies/individuals who are obviously
avoiding smart dust monitoring? If nothing is done we could have the
worst of all worlds, where the average citizen's life is completely
transparent while a rogue country run by a dictatorship is allowed to
work on any secret projects it feels like.
If countermeasures are not tolerated, then at the level of
international / global relations, smart dust would enable states to
permanently
and pervasively have myriad eyes, ears and chemsniffers keep track in
real-time of exactly what other states are up to, thereby for the first
time radically preventing all those "yes, you did / are doing that /
no, we did not / are not doing that" shenanigans such as, for example,
with the intelligence snafu re Saddam's WMDs; Iran's nuclear ambitions;
the true state of North Korea's nuclear capability etc. Such Smart
Dust monitoring and intelligence-gathering systems should also make it
fairly easy to finally really rat out a terrorist network like al-Qaeda
and would be extremely effective at preventing that new versions of
such networks have a chance to grow beyond the earliest budding
stage.
At the national level, such systems would enable individual
citizens to monitor and verify the strict legality of all the
actions of all the elected as well as otherwise appointed agents of its
government, judiciary, police-force, and armed forces... including
even the merest eye-blinking of the people in power all the
way at the top of each of these arms of the state. The, at least in the
West, deeply ingrained and quite justified "suspicion of
authority" would finally dispose of the tools needed to reliably verify
and monitor the subjects of those suspicions.
Such extremely fine-grained monitoring capabilities would similarly
enable the citizenry to collectively keep a close eye on all other
non-governmental "players" who concentrate and wield societally
significant powers — financial, economical, political, persuasive,
informational, societal etc. powers — such as mega-corporations
(e.g.
financial and other white-collar crime), utilities-providers (e.g.
carbon-emissions and other forms of pollution), the press (e.g. fourth
estate abuses of power) and any other societal-player-of-consequence
that one could care to name.
Inevitably and logically, the capability for permanent and pervasive
bottom-up sousveillance by citizens of those who govern and administer
them, would be matched with similar top-down capabilities.
This would result
in a situation where citizens would no longer be able to cheat the state
on their taxes or carry out any other incivic behavior, particularly
misdemeanors and crimes of all sorts. Interestingly, with such systems
in place, judges and courts would never again be unable to adjudicate
cases for lack of evidence. Such systems would result in
both government agents as well as citizens having ever less
capability to have anything to hide.
In such a totally "transparent" society and world, the only privacy left
to all people would be the privacy of their own thoughts. No doubt that
such an extreme erosion of privacy would be an extremely
high
price to pay. The only way that we can see how societies and
individuals
might accept to pay — kicking and screaming, for sure — this
high price,
is if the transparency is genuinely two-way, genuinely
reciprocal.
What would be gotten in return, is the chance, finally, at a world that
is genuinely free of internal and external armed
conflicts,
crimes and the myriad other ways humans have been cheating and being
otherwise detrimental to other humans since the dawn of
humanity.
Would the resulting societies be democratic ones? On the critical
condition that the parallel Smart Dust sousveillance and surveillance
systems deployed enable genuinely reciprocal accountability and
transparency from bottom-to-top as well as from top-to-bottom... such
systems would create the conditions for the arguably first fully
realized/actualized democracies.
Think of it as Democracy-on-steroids because the quasi-total
pervasiveness of the sousveillance would probably deter any incivic acts
to actually be committed... the Rule of Law taken to its extreme. The
near-absence of privacy will — certainly at first — probably
make it feel
quite different than the democracies we have living experience of, but
we will probably adapt to this new state too and — grudgingly
perhaps —
recognize and enjoy its important benefits.
Given that our world is still quite replete with people who have a lot
to hide (and who will be less than amused, to say the least, to feel
their wiggle room shrivel up around them), and that everybody else will
intensely dislike the loss of nearly all privacy, there are no prizes
for predicting that such a system will be the subject of distinctly
mixed feelings: virtually universally loathing mixed with grudging
recognition and appreciation of its upsides.
Human nature being what it is,
like democracy, radical reciprocal accountability and transparency will
probably be quite messy and uncomfortable for most people. There would
probably not be better alternatives available though. Unfortunately,
such technologies and their societal effects will likely be tried and
accepted politically only when all the other alternatives fail.
Hopefully before it is too late though. Even then, that grudging
acceptance will be painful, but the benefits would ultimately so
outweigh the less pleasant aspects that it seems all but inevitable that
these systems will be seriously considered and, on balance, their
deployment and operational use be deemed to be in the greater interest
of humanity as a whole and all of its
members.
5.2 GLOBAL IMMUNE SYSTEM
The PSDS systems-based SecurityPreserver program can be thought of as
the detection and counter-attack coordination parts of an auto-immune
system of humanity. Our
BioShield [2] and
NanoShield [3] programs can be
thought of as
elements of
the "counter-attack & neutralize" parts of that same species-level
auto-immune system.
6. CONCLUSION
The SecurityPreserver program addresses real concerns.
"There's a long-standing problem in astronomy called the Fermi Paradox,
named for physicist Enrico Fermi who first proposed it in 1950. If the
universe should be teeming with life, asked Fermi, then where are all
the aliens? The question is even more vexing today: SETI, the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence with radio telescopes, has utterly
failed to turn up any sign of alien life forms. Why?
One chillingly likely possibility is that, as the ability to wreak
damage on a grand scale becomes more readily available to individuals,
soon enough just one malcontent, or one lunatic, will be able to
destroy an entire world. Perhaps countless alien civilizations have
already been wiped out by single terrorists who'd been left alone to
work unmonitored in their private laboratories."
A smart dust system could be used to abridge long-held
Constitutionally-protected rights to privacy. Special enabling
legislation or even an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might be
required to implement smart dust in a manner that would pass
Constitutional muster at the U.S. Supreme Court with similar need for
changes in laws of other countries. But as noted by Neil Jacobstein,
Chairman of the
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing:
"Nanotechnology-enabled transparency and accountability will produce
the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that
have been tried from time to time."
Is it acceptable for governments to monitor civilians with quintillions
of sensors, and for civilians to monitor their governments with
quintillions of sensors? Or is that irresponsible and dangerous?
Many prominent thinkers including David Brin
[4]
have debated this issue.
A
larger policy question is: should we implement defenses to try to
handle every possible class of attack, or should we attempt to stop
hostile forces from unleashing the attacks in the first place —
which may require extensive surveillance? Each attack prevented by
good surveillance is one less attack that might possibly overwhelm our
defenses.
3.
Lifeboat
Foundation NanoShield by
Michael Vassar and Robert
A. Freitas Jr., with participation
by Amara D. Angelica, Philippe Van Nedervelde, Mike Treder and other
Scientific Advisory Board members, Sept 2006.
Berkeley Webs. Home of
TinyOS : Operating System support for sensor tiny networked sensors,
TinyDB : A query processing system designed to extract info from a
network of TinyOS sensors,
TOSSIM : TinyOS mote simulator, and many other related sites.
NEST Project at Berkeley: an Open Experimental software/hardware
Platform for Network Embedded Systems Technology research that will
accelerate the development of algorithms, services, and their
composition into challenging applications dramatically. Small,
networked sensor/effector nodes are developed to ground algorithmic
work in the reality of working with numerous, highly constrained
devices.
