US Department of Homeland Security looking for (more than) a few good drones
networkworld.comI know this is going to sound like hyperbole, and I apologize, but I believe that the networked computer is a bigger danger to mankind than nuclear weapons. We are completely destroying the innate quality that we've had as humans since we came out of the trees - anonymity and privacy.
I'm not saying technology is bad; I'm no Luddite. But we are entering places in our societal structures that we've never been before even in the strictest police states. Maybe it's grumpy old guy day again, but I do not feel that this is going to turn out well over the long run.
ADD: Of all the things I thought 20 years ago that I might be concerned about in the 2010s, "swarms of flying robots able to watch and record my every move" was not one of them. The future is not only stranger than you imagine; it is stranger than you can imagine. And that's just robotic drone surveillance. There's a dozen other networked technology devices that are much more worrying.
I'm going to have to disagree with the idea that anonymity and privacy are innate qualities that we've had as humans since we came out of the trees.
I think those are actually innate qualities of civilization not of the human species in general. If you think about it, the savage more or less lived his whole life in the "public eye" of his tribe/village. It was civilization that finally afforded him some privacy.
And that's what I find so troubling about the panopticon society. It somehow feels extremely uncivilized. To the point of savagery.
We've always been social creatures and when we came out of the trees did we really have anonymity and privacy? Village life has been the norm for most of your history and I believe that anonymity and privacy aren't the norm in village life. Am I wrong?
It seems to me that only since mass urbanization has there been anonymity and privacy and we begin to revert back to the historical mean. Although at a much grander scale. Is it the scale that is the danger? In the past one could leave the village for another location (in theory) and get away from stigma. Maybe now it is much harder.
Of course now there is much more information and many more instances of instant fame. Perhaps the noise will be anonymize us except to the powers that be.
There's another thread that makes the same case: these things are not old.
As far as I know, we come from clan-like nomads, varying between a alpha-male-harem model with young males on the outskirts and a pair-bonding model with young males striking out on their own. That means that those in your clan have generally had a very close and intimate view of your activities -- and you of theirs. But also that 1) clans were by necessity small, and 2) you always had the ability to walk away. Village life gets a little more complicated, but there is a span of control issue at work: you simply can only be concerned with so many things at the same time. People who are not physically near you have privacy from your oversight. In fact, much of human social behavior is about the trading of information about other people, their thoughts and behaviors. The trust engendered forms alliances and creates a communal atmosphere.
The state of nature is that I can choose to talk away from any group of humans. Once I am several hundred meters away, whatever I am doing is anonymous and private. I can choose to share something with one or a few special friends. I can choose not to share something with somebody who has offended me. And so on.
But now it's possible to be concerned with millions of things at the same time. Computers can watch millions very closely. You can't walk away from a group of humans and have privacy and anonymity. The system will track you. Your call phone, for instance, has capabilities that make it more or less something akin to a cross between a surveillance device and a wildlife tracking tag. The natural limits that draconian states have over their people are melting away. That's completely new.
So yes, we've always been social creatures, but society has been defined by the physical and natural limits on cognition and communication. What we're turning into is not just a more social version of man. It's something completely different. As the other commenter pointed out, it's really more savage than social.
I understood your first comment to be in relation to governmental spying and neighbors (the whole world) spying. I agree the former is a serious problem and will likely have radical consequences but the latter I think won't be a problem. There is too much noise for you and I to keep on top of all the latest rumors and whatnot. I can retain anonymity and privacy from the average person but not from the government or corporations.
When you see the video below, it's easy to imagine how likely that future will be if citizens don't care about what their Government is doing and simply let them pass all the bad laws, without any major outrage:
http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/05/plurality-an-amazing-short-f...
We've already seen how advanced western Governments think about stuff like this (in UK, but also in US) - "when it's easy and cheap enough to apply mass-surveillance of all forms of communications, why not do it?". So they'll do it even if it's unconstitutional, once the technology becomes cheap enough and people still don't react to these moves en mass.
There will be new technologies in the future that will simply be irresistible to the Governments that can implement them nation-wide. It's the population's job to be very vigilant about it and make sure they don't abuse them (or use them at all).
Perhaps people will get clued in and protest. I'm hoping for a grassroots org to use handheld devices and, in aggregate, constantly monitor all police and lawmakers, posting their every move online.
Sorry I'm a bit curious, but what are the dozen other networked technology devices that are much more worrying?
I must strongly disagree with you. It sounds like you have already given up.
On this forum someone posted a way to visualize factorizations of numbers in Haskell. Quickly someone put up a javascript version. Soon I expect someone will turn it to a webapp that makes it possible for anyone to use and if lucky may go 'viral'. The power of networks is in that kind of recursive mashup. This is a toy now but hopefully is a sign of things to come. Consider that in a way, google and stackoverflow are caches for experience. Memoizing experience to increase efficiency. In a very real sense the ease of networks and communication results in a non trivial increase in the intelligence of the society.
We hope that there will be a whole group of researchers willing to take the different parts of this process [(e.g. model organisms, high throughput omics technologies, drug development and repurposing, cellular and stem cell research)] and produce enough data so that it will become a whole new line of research. Like the small amounts of giving inherent in crowdfunding, we think many experts, each contributing a small amount of research, can accomplish much in aggregate. Crowdsourced research may enable new advancements that were not possible before.
http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2012/07/guest-post-jimmy-lin-...
Also worth pointing out is that while the specific instance of drones was not foremost in the list of dystopian worries, a surveillance society has existed as a worry since at least the 1940's. But despite the worries of Orwell and Huxley society is not near as bad as they expected. Indeed on average things are better for most people. From the average poor European to the average African.
It is easier to focus on the bad aspects of a thing and worry on the worst possible outcome. Indeed that is the nature of humanity for that Type of error is least costly from an evolutionary perspective. But networks are a tool. A tool which gives more than it takes, A good thing.
Information is power. Anything that increases the fluidity of its flow and its abundance is on the side of freedom. While it is true that everyone will be watched. It is also true that everyone will be watched, it will be ever harder for political leaders to deceive. The answer is not to stifle information flow but to make tools that make it possible to be hidden in plain site. Push decentralization, Encryption, clothing, tattoos, camera detection, IR accessories or private camera detecting-IR emitting drones. Action is the answer not worrying and lamenting. A Good thing can only be illegal if the governed quietly succumb to the inevitability of its occurrence.
That's federal level. State and local police are already shopping and some are already working with local military bases to use theirs.
All warrantless, no oversight. The mission creep is going to be scary.
They'll have to find a way to justify their incredible expense for the 99% of time they would be idle, so imagine the equal to speeding ticket quotas that will emerge.
I was at a law enforcement show this week and drones were the big new thing. Most were either quadcopters with GoPros while others looked like mini helicopters with PTZ cameras strapped to them.
Better funded departments are starting to test them out, but the demand from local police still isn't quite there. They require obtaining a special FAA license and lots of training, which makes the sales cycles on drones long and unattractive to vendors selling one at a time to local PDs.
Still though, their pitch is: "A helicopter flight cost is $450/hr. A drone is $14." Saving PDs the cost of flying a drone to/over an accident scene is more the draw than snooping into buildings.
There are many perfectly good uses for drones, but we all know the regulatory oversight will be completely negligent and insufficient.
It's in light of that that I have to wonder whether drones should just be vilified altogther.
I have to wonder whether drones should just be vilified altogther.
Good question. I can see uses for drones. I know guys who will personally benefit from automation like this.
I say take a hard stand against them: no drones, period.
Because 'give them an inch they'll take a mile' is why.
Excellent podcast on the ethics of automated systems deployed by military, LEOs, etc. featuring Noel Sharkey:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/6600
From the teaser:
"Noel Sharkey is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science, and lectures extensively across academic disciplines, including engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. In addition to having published well over a hundred academic articles and books, Sharkey has worked closely with policy makers and the military to create awareness about the limitations of AI and the dangers of automated warfare."
I was watching a documentary the other day about border smuggling - surely it's only a matter of time before drones are used for that, in which case what hope has domestic law enforcement got if they don't go down the same path.
Smugglers have used submarines. Law enforcement has already "no hope", and that is entirely by design. If you want LE and criminals to be equal then you end up in a country run by criminals.
No, there is more than the technical advantage held by police which factors into this. There is also the extent to which the mass of people tend to believe whether it is better to do things in a law-abiding manner or whether legal authority is completely disrespectable and not worth obeying.
There was a post here on HN not too long ago about exactly this. Drug cartels using ultralight drones to smuggle drugs across borders.
Preventing drug use has always been a lost cause anyway, there never was hope to be had on that path.
Speaking of drones:
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/drone-fi...
Obligatory book recommendation: http://www.amazon.de/Kill-Decision-Daniel-Suarez/dp/05259526...
The scariest thing about drones is that if both sides have drones, the winning strategy would seem to be in having millions of cheap drones directed by the sort of algorithms currently used in high frequency trading. Putting humans in the decision making loop for all of those just slows them down and vastly increases the expense and manpower requirements.
There's very, very little work going on with AI in drones. We're not there yet. We're still working on getting the sensors right and dealing with datalinks. The vast majority are remotely piloted, some are remotely directed (point and click to location, the drone maneuvers to get there), all are controlled by humans.
This "robot drone aircraft freakout" sounds as silly to me as an aerospace engineer as worries about malicious hackers shutting down the US power grid sound to you.
I'm fairly knowledgeable about computer security and slightly to somewhat about power distribution, and for a well-resourced hacker ($10-50mm), shutting down the US power grid actually wouldn't be terribly difficult.
Leaving aside any attacks on the control system, the actual physical infrastructure is quite vulnerable. It operates close to breakdown on many days anyway, so it would just take the loss of some critical lines and maybe substations to cause (if lucky) widespread controlled blackouts and load shedding, or if unlucky, uncontrolled massive blackouts.
Since 9/11 they've fortified certain pieces (in the late 1990s, a 3 guys with crowbars and pistols could have broken into major grid operations centers and shut them down), but a lot of it is still fairly vulnerable.
The UK experienced chaos when a small group of farmers and lorry drivers blocked oil refineries.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_protests_in_the_United_Kin...)
Some aspects of security are purely reactive (One man with a shoe bomb? All passengers now remove their shoes. One man with an underwear bomb? All passengers now go through millimetre wave scanners) and so this vulnerability has been fixed. Other protests were much less successful.
I am not pointing out current capabilities, I am just hypothesizing on what is likely to develop in drone war when more than one side has drones.
UK already has these for police. The Merseyside Police managed to ditch one of theirs into a lake. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-15520279
That does it. I'm defending my airspace with anti-drone drones (until they are illegal).
As soon as I saw the Parrot AR Drone I imagined putting a small stripped down pellet gun on it.
I bet AR Drone will mysteriously become illegal soon.
Technically, it already is for outdoor use in the UK, unless the person flying it is not the person looking at the first person view, as the pilot has to keep visual contact with the aircraft. Also if you use one for anything commercial you are required to hold a civil pilots licence.
Illegal for you.
This brings up an interesting point. Anti-drone drones may well be much cheaper and more maneuverable than general purpose drones and people in general have far fewer ethical concerns when targeting a drone, as it is basically just property damage. In fact I suspect that some people would even look on drone hunting as some sort of extreme sport.
Another social effect of the introduction of a mass of visible drones is that it has the potential to drive a reasonable amount of an armed and already fairly paranoid population, completely and utterly nuts.
And whatever the police think about how useful these things are, I doubt that having a lot of drones flying around is going to encourage politeness, to put it mildly. A hell of a lot of people fear these things and fear makes a lot of people go crazy.