Or, at least, your cellphone, your id, your face...
Dystopic near-future sci-fi is one of my favorite genres. Gattaca, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Twelve Monkeys – some intriguing ideas there, and always beautifully shot.
Today we take a wander down that path – not things to be Deeply Offended™ about today, but to consider for the future.
Given the technological power at the disposal of governments, I wonder what true totalitarian regimes would be able to do today.
Back in the Soviet Union, the KGB could track the connections of a target on a notecard by drawing links to their friends, other links to their friends, and so on. However, effectiveness was limited by the size of the card and the difficulty of cross-referencing.
Well, now the cards are databases are infinitely large and really, really fast. We call them Facebook and LinkedIn. But what would be extra-double-useful was the ability to track where people actually were in real time.
But not to worry – we wouldn’t have to worry about that here. Right?
Well, at least one Arizona university is leading us into that Brave New World:
Students at Northern Arizona University will have a hard time skipping large classes next fall because of a new attendance monitoring system.
The new system will use sensors to detect students’ university identification cards when they enter classrooms, according to NAU spokesperson Tom Bauer. The data will be recorded and available for professors to examine.
Yes, it’s like taking attendance. But any time you what was a human process, automate it, and put it in a database it suddenly becomes something different. This is one reason I have to disagree with the otherwise brilliant Kevin Drum on why national ID cards can be a problem.
Our passports already have RFID chips in them – the things the AZ kids were getting tracked with. Imagine, say, that a bomb actually succeeds in Times Square. No, we can’t search everyone. But we could require that everyone beep through.
Still pretty far fetched in the US, I grant you, despite the inevitable scaremongering that will result from this most recent failed attack.
However, you can imagine how much the Iranians or Chinese would enjoy having such a capability. Yes, it wouldn’t be effective at tracking the outlier criminals – but it sure would be at tracking the average law-abiding citizen. And that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?
