Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz of Awakening Technology point to Global Neighborhood Watch, a provocative and somewhat disturbing 2010 scenario about “connecting the dots” in the fight against terrorism, written on June 20 by Bill McKelvey, professor at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, and Max Boisot, senior research fellow at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. ¬¨‚Ć
Citizens carry or wear explosive detecting sensors linked to the National Counterterrorism Center’s computers. ¬¨‚ĆThey call this a “socio-computational” approach to intelligence gathering and analysis.
An Orwellian futuristic scenario on how two network theorists imagine a country might enlist its citizens in fighting terrorists. They call it Global Neighborhood Watch. Just as a traditional neighborhood watch deputizes people living on the same block to prevent local crime, the global watch would turn participants into mobile intelligence gatherers, feeding data from chemical sensors or simply with their own eyes into a sophisticated, governmentrun system that would create hypotheses about what that data means.
P & T commented: “In light of the London bombings, it’s not hard to imagine how this kind of system would break down — timing is everything”.
(Thank you again Peter & Trudy !)
also see comments on Be The Media of June 27-28
Comments
@ 18:13
What an evil scheme ! It seems to be more “distributed stupidity” rather than “distributed intelligence”.
There is no prospect of explosive detectors which can be bult into a mobile phones which will not suffer from a massive number of false alarms.
(”Ye cannae change the laws of physics”) e.g.
TATP, the explosve used by many Palestinian suicide bombers, and allegedly used in the recent London bombs, only gives off acetone which can be detected, and oxygen, which cannot.
How many people wearing nail varnish, or having acetone based nail varnish remover in their handbags, would such a “distributed stupidity” system flag as “suspicous” ?
If people are properly trained and motivated to look for “suspicous” behavior that is fine, but to force people to wait while they phone up some automated artifical stupidity decision making system, before they act in a dangerous situation, smacks of the worst kind of communist style police state bureaucracy, which stifles all initiative.
The ideat of any such system becoming truely global, is simply laughable.