The Foresight Nanotech Institute’s Christine Peterson was interviewed by Earth & Sky about nanotechnology and surveillance.Peterson raises serious questions about the types of data that will exist in the surveillance environments of the near future as a result of nanotech-enabled chemical sensing technologies.

Peterson begins the interview conjuring the following scenario:

One can imagine, perhaps, I’m speculating, that eventually federal education funding might be dependent on the deployment of these sensors in the classroom. If there’s any students present who perhaps have been indulging the night before, alarms would ring, class would come to a halt, and those students might get in trouble.

The article discusses the inevitable development of technology from corporate/government scale deployment to its eventual distribution in the hands of individuals. The range of events detectable by nanotech systems currently being developed include weapons, illness, and, as the earlier quotation indicates, behaviours.

I was reminded of an earlier news item on Pink Tentacle about a mood detection system developed at the University of Tokyo.

Surely the greatest concern we should have about these surveillance systems should be directed at the flaky theories used to integrate the data. Most existing data protection legislation can handle individual bits of data indexed to a person. However, once bad-theory is instantiated in analysis tools we would have no means to gain access to the data driving decision making about us even if we had access to our raw data. Data analysis law will be the next battleground of civil-liberties, intellectual property and surveillance. Perhaps we should all take the ridiculous psychometric theories propagating amongst human resource departments a little more seriously.

As these new technologies spread the odds of our being bad-mouthed by bad-theory on an daily basis grow.

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