After two weeks of setting up this blog and posting mainly interesting fluff. It is time to take a breather for the weekend and then do some real writing.
Nanotechnology, 3D printing, Intellectual Property, Biology, Brain Computer Interfaces, Programming, Predictions of Technology, Unintended Consequences, Simple Solutions, and Life Extension Technologies are the themes of this blog.
I thank you for your patience, there was a large learning curve setting up this blog.
Prior restraint is a simple concept.
A man owns a book store where half the books are evil, the other half are not. Because his stores inventory is half evil, it is shut down.
A man owns a book store with one evil book and forty thousand good books. Because of that one evil book, his store is shut down.
Prior restraint describes both of these cases. Both book stores were shut down, preventing access to the good, legitimate, and legal works. When in reality only the evil books should have been removed, and the stores allowed to continue doing business. Simple isn’t it?
The lead up is done, now the article …
Recently a web site called MegaUpload.com was taken offline by the FBI. MegaUpload.com was an online file hosting service where you could store your files and access them from anywhere with an internet connection. Many of the files infringed on copyright, but many others did not. This is a difficult conundrum, for a sizable portion of the 180 million users of this file service. If even 2% of them are not sharing files that are somehow are illegal, that means 3.6 million people have lost their files. What they see is this, with no ability to reclaim their files.
Now I ask a simple question. If one book in a store is good, and 40 thousand are bad, do you close down the book store, or do you remove the bad books and leave the one?
Truth be told, being an engineer and a programmer, a brain computer interface (BCI) or headband is something I crave to the core of my being. The ease of having a swype style mental keyboard. The ability to think a mouse into position and click, highlight, copy, and paste is amazing. The ability to visualize an image onto the screen (1), with just a thought. The ability to record and playback events through my own eyes. This seems like science fiction yet IBM predicts that mind reading computers are less than five years away.
This is worrisome with the continued slow erosion of the US fourth amendment and EU privacy rights. Combine that with warrant-less wire tapping and the push to have ISP’s track everything you do online, and you have serious issues. Computer programs now store most of what you type temporarily so that you can undo mistakes. They cache the websites you have visited and the searches you have done. They store the files you have opened recently. Now imagine a time when there are no keyboards or mice, when you wear a headband instead of a using a keyboard. When you think to your computer. The programs will likely store your thoughts.
Imagine your first day with a new BCI headband. You just picked it up at the local computer store, the clerk blue toothed it to your phone with 64 T-bytes of memory and you turn it on and begin recording. You you look at the person passing by, think about work, how your boss is a jerk, you wife annoys you, your kids screaming, and fantasize about the woman in the red dress that just walked by. You then begin your drive home and get pulled over.
What random memory could a law officer find while pulling someone over for a traffic violation. It is an interesting thought, in light of how often police search cellphones without a warrant, and US customs agents need no warrant is needed to search through your electronics. In this near future an officer is able to pick up your BCI and go through your last mental notes, any stray stored fantasies, or random thoughts. That is the first step towards saying good bye to the fifth amendment, having thought police (*), and allowing dreams and fantasies to be used against you in a court of law.
Between ISP monitoring, the drift away from the fundamental rights of the US Constitution, ACTA in the EU and US, never ending expansions of copyright lengths, warrant-less wire tapping, the cloud, and mission creep this is a reality far from what our founding fathers could have ever predicted when penning the constitution.
In ten years, don’t worry when a politician asserts. “If you aren’t thinking anything wrong, then you shouldn’t worry about us monitoring your thoughts.” after all he only has your best interest in mind.