The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later.
Experts told the BBC some ideas were feasible but others seemed "ludicrous".
A similar scheme aimed at manipulating wasps failed when they flew off to feed and mate.
That's the hopeful note -- that projects like this will simply fail because biology is stronger than technology, and that the military scientists involved will end up looking like the men who stare at goats.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
NJ town residents to assist with virtual police surveillance
Soon-to-be-chosen residents will get access to a a Web site that provides panoramic views of their block, allows them to type in general complaints, pinpoint a problem location, immediately send that information to police headquarters, and simultaneously activate hidden police surveillance cameras, Cordero said.
With its potential to include a vast number of crime-fighting community participants, the Virtual Community Patrol may be the first such project of its kind in the nation, Cordero said.
"We plan on giving the community control of a very powerful technology," Cordero said. [...]
"We want to now give them shared virtual control of their community," Cordero said. "Essentially, when they see something that alarms them, they can go to the Web site, type in information, and hit send.
"We will then get an alert in our community center, and, automatically, video cameras will turn to what they (the neighborhood resident) are looking at, or what they are complaining about," Cordero said. "We'll see what they're seeing. We'll be able to respond quicker." [...]
The other major initiative included the installation of police barricades along a two-block stretch of Lenox Avenue and of Amherst Street, to control who drives through the neighborhoods. [...]
The city's contracted video surveillance camera provider -- PackeTalk, a Manhattan company that provides broadband networks for law enforcement organizations -- jumped at the anti-crime initiative, when city police first came up with the idea four or five months ago, and voluntarily helped turn the dream into reality, Cordero said.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Will it soon be illegal to expose govn't law-breaking?
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.
"The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact," said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Robot "pack mule" (and simulacra)
A four-legged robotic "pack mule" has been developed for the US military to help soldiers carry equipment over rough terrain. In general, and especially in a collapse context, the broad application of such a robot has some obvious shortcomings like those discussed in last month's posts about fuel from switchgrass and switchgrass and horses; essentially that there are lots of biological creatures who can do certain jobs much better and more ecologically than machines built to imitate them for an industrial scale, and who reproduce themselves.
Or take this new tick-killing robot which is supposed to find and kill ticks with pesticides. I was just talking with Lierre Keith the other day about how she used to have ticks on her land, but as soon as she got a few guinea fowl the ticks were devoured by the birds and are no longer present around her house. And the guinea fowl give delicious eggs!
But the motivation behind this endeavour may have a lot in common with research into genetic engineering, nanotechnology and tiny self-replicating machines. I've read some feminists who have basically said that the real motivation behind such research is that male scientists who can't create life (because they can't give birth to children) are trying to create life through some surrogate method. But I think it's more than that.
I think that they appreciate how beautiful life is, how amazing are the tiny cells engaging in their intricate microscopic dances, how they reproduce themselves, how they do all of the little jobs that allow life to exist. But those cells, those bacteria and fungi are basically a bunch of anarchists who don't know how to take orders. The point of their research is to create modified versions or simulacra of actual living creatures who can be controlled. Who will do exactly what the scientists and their backers want. Perhaps you could say that research into self-replicating machines is like a vast, peer-reviewed version of The Stepford Wives.
Thursday, March 2, 2006
Military mind-controlled surveillance sharks
In a move which is creepily resonant with my recent post about carnivorous military cyborgs, the US military is trying to create surveillance sharks with brain implants that would allow the sharks to be remote-controlled from a distance. The sharks themselves would have additional equipment to act as "stealth spies".
This isn't totally new. Actually, the practice of implanting surveillance devices in animals goes back at least as early as 1967, when the CIA implanted electronic devices into a cat (including a microphone, battery, and an antenna in the tail) and surgically removed its sense of hunger. The intent was to use the cat to spy on the Soviets, but the spy was run over by a car and killed on its first "mission". (I wonder if it committed suicide like some previous CIA experimental animals.)
There are clearly many moral and ethical problems with these practices. But what worries me most, as I wrote in my previous post, is that military cyborgs will be used in an increasingly energy-starved world to make up for the fact that actual robots are very energy-intensive to manufacture and maintain. A cyborg wouldn't have to be.
It's been revealed that the US government is quietly reclassifying previously unclassified documents. Not only are they not sharing information, they're hiding information they shared before. With trends like that, and with corporate influence in cyberspace threatening "The End of Internet" (and with vastly increasing surveillance on the internet in general and email in particular) this is an excellent time to get whatever information you can from available knowledge sources -- in case they start getting worse.
Official estimates recently placed the number of ecological refugees (people displaced by ecological degradation or disaster) at about 10 million, but that number may be significantly larger. In any case, ecological refugees outnumber all other categories of refugees, including those displaced by war. The number of ecological refugees requiring help from the Red Cross increased by a factor of ten between 1992 and 1998. And that population is due to continue to increase dramatically in the coming years, to 150 million, although it could be much more than that since the impact of climate change has been historically underestimated.
So the question for me is, with all of these new refugees from ecological causes alone how will people in power treat them? I think that the construction of new detention camps in the US gives us part of the answer.
Historically those in power have often moved indentured or enslaved labourers from their homelands and away from their communities and social support networks to exploit and indoctrinate them more effectively. This includes the slavery of Africans in America, the Gulags of Soviet Russia, and the modern day charcoal slaves of Brazil. Many of the people who currently work in sweatshops in Asia were forced into slums and factory labour after being displaced from their rural homes. And after the Second World War many people who left Europe to move to Canada or the US were forced to work as maids or domestic servants for years to be allowed citizenship, including people I know. (I'm not saying their economic circumstances forced them to work as domestic servants which is commonly the case now. I'm saying that was an explicit government requirement.) So people in an increasing population of ecological refugees would certainly be integrated as labourers in whatever exploitative system dominates the land they are displaced to.
That becomes especially true and worrying in a collapse context. As cheap oil declines those in power will surely use human power to fill in that energy gap. Much commercial fruit and vegetable in North America is currently dependant on migrant labourers to do the actual hands-on labour like picking food. Peak oil will likely mean a decrease in the availability of fuel for tractors and energy-hungry synthetic fertilizers for farms. So agriculture, and other industries, will probably see an increase in exploitative manual labour and even slavery as collapse proceeds. Indeed, the people running those industries will recognize that increased exploitative labour will be required to keep those industries intact. They certainly aren't going to recommend that people grow their own food and stop buying it or other products.
I've long thought that those in power deliberately want to destroy the world. Not just because they don't value it for its own sake (which they don't), or because its destruction is a byproduct of "business as usual". But because the world has to be destroyed to force people to participate in civilization by destroying all other means people have to sustain themselves. For those in power in industrial civilization a handy supply of labourers from a growing population of ecological refugees would only be one more handy side benefit of destroying the world. Also for them, those labourers will be especially useful during collapse.
Right now experiments like those are justified as helping to understand "neural computation" or to move towards machine components that can be miniaturized more easily. There's another reason that such experiments might become more common, though. Electronic components require plenty of energy and cheap resources to build and run. A biological machine component could conceivably be built with less infrastructure, and with fewer resources, than an equivalent industrial electronic part. That may make biological / machine hybrids -- cyborgs -- a more feasible approach to some machines in a collapse context. That's not really a new idea; think of the Terminator movies. And they wouldn't have to be like that or like the Borg from Star Trek to be useful for machine applications. It could be something very simple, like Cleve Backster's experiments hooking up plants to polygraph machines.
Some people are already working on machines that would not necessarily have biological components, but be actively fueled by consuming actual living creatures. They've been dubbed gastrobots, and there are already varieties fueled by eating slugs (see Slugbot) and flies (see Chew Chew). The creator of gastrobot Chew Chew notes that the "ideal fuel, in terms of energy gain, is meat."
A combination of the two is an obvious step, since biological machine components would require actual nutrients and not just electricity to function. As an extreme example imagine a cyborg version of the US military's armed TALON robot which didn't need fossil fuels for energy but fueled itself by killing and eating "enemy combatants" (remember that meat is the ideal fuel).
The idea is incredibly horrific. But part of the reason I find this interesting is because civilization itself is a machine that feeds on living creatures, and at this point humans are effectively interchangeable biological components in the much larger machine of industrial civilization. Carnivorous robots and cyborgs may or may not emerge as a temporary adaptation to collapse for some machines. That's an interesting conjecture, but what's more interesting to me is the way that the structure of civilization on a large scale can be mirrored in a particular machine. It's like a fractal, a shape that repeats the same substructures over and over on many different scales. And so to get ride of those structures at any scale we have to dismantle it at every scale.
Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.
Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Further email surveillance
The use of computers and the internet for activism, to try to change the world, is full of contradictions. Even though if embrace social justice and environmentalism, the computer hardware the internet requires is made under terrible labour conditions and at tremendous ecological cost. And even though the internet allows us to observe transgressions against human rights and ecology around the world, it lets us to so at such a great physical and pyschological distance that we can rarely do anything about any particular incident.
Perhaps one of the biggest contradictions is that it allows us unprecedented levels of communication with each other -- and allows for virtually all of those communications to be closely surveilled. This week a judge approved email spying on anyone under the Patriot Act for any reason "relating to an investigation". Although I'm sure that some organizations have been monitoring email for much, much longer than that (see yesterday's link to ECHELON) this is still a good reminder to learn more about tools like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) that you can use to encrypt your email. The greater the proportion of emails sent are encrypted the more effort it will take for them to engage in universal email surveillance.
I should note, though, that there isn't really any reliable method to be totally secure or private on a computer. If they really have an interest in you, they can read your email before it is encrypted by using keystroke loggers (which the FBI has used to get around PGP before), by listening to the sounds your keyboard makes with an audio bug, or even using Van Eck phreaking (which in theory could let someone read your monitor at a distance by "listening" to the radio waves it produces in operation).
Thursday, February 9, 2006
Expanding surveillance
You've perhaps read about the recent US government plan to build a massive computer system that will scan the internet for any hints of terrorist activity. (The linked article doesn't even bother to mention the much older and probably much larger ECHELON network.)
Like previous surveillance in recent history, the focus will probably be just as much on surveilling more liberal organizations like ACLU as it is people who might actually plan anything actively violent. It's a very old trend; probably the first surveillance photographs ever taken were of British Suffragettes attempting to get the vote. Those photos were also among the first to be doctored for propaganda purposes, for example by replacing a guard's arm around a woman's neck with a "fashionable scarf".
In related news in the Netherlands a new "Big Brother" prison opened this week. All inmates will be forced to wear tracking wristbands and "emotional recognition software" will use inputs from microphones in cells to monitor the emotional states of inmates.
Historically, the majority of energy and manufacturing in industrial society has been directly or indirectly contributing to or resulting from war. The military uses about a third of the US oil supply. Once available energy supplies are drastically reduced, do you think that the military will attempt to monopolize the output of sustainable power facilities, using “national security” or other excuses? For example, I have visions of a biodiesel powered Abrams tank, and electric windmills spinning atop the Pentagon.
The events of the past two years have only increased my worries. Not only do I think the military will commandeer that output, but they are making active efforts to set up their own "renewable" power facilities so that they can continue with their current practices.
Six months after I wrote the above, the United States Marine Corps publicized their creation of a diesel-electrical hybrid Humvee for “reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeting.” One news report suggested that “its diesel-electric hybrid powertrain could make environment-friendly [sic] fast attack vehicles the norm.”
U.S. Senator Harry Reid [said] "These are the kinds of ventures we hope to repeat across the West, and the nation, as part of our drive for energy independence by 2020."
"Energy independence is an important strategy for our military," said Tim Carlson, PBR's President. "Because our project is powered by the sun, it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. And since energy from the sun is a free, sustainable, renewable resource, it also allows the military to control their energy costs [and us!]. That's important for tax payers," he continued.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. There are people in power who know what is happening, who know that collapse will happen, and are setting themselves up to maintain whatever systems of social and military control they can. Any large-scale project to build industrial "renewables" can contribute to those goals, and they know that, too.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
Detention camps and strategies of control
You've probably read about Homeland Security's plan to build vast new detention camps to provide "temporary detention and processing capabilities":
The contract ... calls for preparing for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a natural disaster." The release offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these facilities, or when. [...]
For those who follow covert government operations abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States. North's activities raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice Department. The concerns persist.
"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."
The way I see it if you are someone in power and you want to control a large population you have a few basic options for doing that. One is to control the movement of people and another is to control the movement of resources those people need to live.
The first strategy is a tricky one, because it's hard to control the movements of an entire population. Maybe if you had really fancy control technology -- like say, autonomous flying killer robots or a system to track the movements of all vehicles in entire countries or of large populations -- then it would be more feasible. But you can't keep every single person in a physical prison because there are jobs that need to be done on the outside to keep the system functioning. So that strategy has historically been limited to an uncooperative or scapegoated minority of a population.
The second strategy to control a population's access to food, water, energy and other essentials of life. Historically this has worked extremely well, and is the basis of how civilization works. Centralizing and locking up food is one of the central functions of civilization.
But this strategy only works if that population lacks the knowledge and capability to produce essentials themselves. Indigenous populations generally have these skills, so to control them and people like them (and stop others from learning their skills) those in power have to destroy their cultures and destroy the landbases that sustain them (by, say, wiping out the buffalo or the salmon, or by evicting people who grow their own food in a urban setting). Civilization also poisons waterways which agricultural runoff and industrial toxins and then offers centralized water treatment plants as a "superior" alternative. That same civilized pattern has been followed for almost all of the essentials of life. If somehow everything outside of civilization isn't poisoned and destroyed then children might learn skills to live with the land, so they have to be locked up during their childhoods in schools where they won't have a chance to learn useful skills.
Of course if you get really advanced you don't even have to have total control over essential resources -- you only have to convince people that you do have control and that they can't do without you.
But if all that fails, then those in power have to fall back to the first strategy and start putting people in camps, prisons, and ghettoes.
For much of the past fifty years in the industrialized world the control of resources through industrial production and distribution has worked effectively as a strategy of control. Cheap and widely available consumer goods (the true cost of which is passed on to those outside of wealthy nations and to future generations of all living creatures) have made it very appealing for some to cooperate. However, the need for ever increasing complexity and energy supplies limits that system and will eventually cause it to collapse as it has already begun to do. It won't be able to meet demand. That will cause communities to learn skills to provide for themselves on a large scale, putting the centralized control of resources into jeopardy.
If the second strategy begins to fail (if people start leaving policed urban centres, growing their own food, and generally supplying their own communities) then emphasis will shift towards the first strategy, the strategy of controlling the movement of people more directly. There are people in power who recognize and are planning for that. I think that's one of the reasons we are hearing about things like "the rapid development of new programs" and the construction of large detention camps.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
The RFID Zapper
Some very creative folks have come up with a way to modify a disposible camera to make an "RFID Zapper" which will permanently disable RFID chips. They write:
Why should I need such a thing?
We have to expect to be surrounded by RFID-Tags almost everywhere within the near future, and they will serve many different purposes. The benefits and risks of this technology and it's use are already being discussed. However, there will be atempts to use RFID-Tags to establish constant surveiliance and to further threaten and compromise the privacy of customers (and citizens and even non-citizens, when gouvernments start to use RFID-Tags like the german gouvernment already did).
To defend yourself against such measures, you might want a small, simple and relatively appealing gadget to permanently deactivate RFID-Tags around you, e.g., to deactivate RFID-Tags in recently bought clothes or books without damaging those.
Their complete plans aren't up yet but will be soon, apparently. For more on RFIDs, see SpyChips.com and the RFID article from Wikipedia.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Police / Army robots in Korea in 5 years?
A Korean government-backed agency is working on police and army robots to be in action within 5 years, according to The Korean Times:
By the 2010s, Korea is expecting to see robots assisting police and the military, patrolling the neighborhoods and going on recon missions on the battlefield. ...
"If the robots prove to be viable technically and commercially, we will be able to begin developing them late next year,'' said Lee Ho-gil, head of the center.
When completed, the outdoor security robots will be able to make their night watch rounds and even chase criminals, according to Lee.
The government also seeks to build combat robots. They will take the shape of a dog or a horse, with six or eight legs or wheels.
US Military builds first prototype of soldier's "exoskeleton"
That's the bad news -- the good news is that it can only run independently for 15 minutes, so far:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has completed the first prototype of an exoskeleton, Bleex 1, which will allow soldiers to carry 70 pounds of supplies on their backs (in addition to the 100 pounds Bleex weighs) while only feeing an extra five pounds of weight beyond their own. Carrying a quart of military standard JP-4 gas, hydraulics power the exoskeleton for 15 minutes of use where military vehicles can't traverse.
According to one source, the next model will carry more weight and allow the user to move at high speeds.
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
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