As Fast Company report Leon, Mexico is about to become the test-bed for a Future; but it might not be the Future you’re looking for:

Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) announced today that it is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.” In a partnership with Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, with a population of more than a million — GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners. That will help law enforcement revolutionize the way we live — not to mention marketers.

“In the future, whether it’s entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris,” says Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers. Before coming to GRI, Carter headed a think tank partnership between Bank of America, Harvard, and MIT. “Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years,” he says.

Leon is the first step. To implement the system, the city is creating a database of irises. Criminals will automatically be enrolled, their irises scanned once convicted. Law-abiding citizens will have the option to opt-in.

When these residents catch a train or bus, or take out money from an ATM, they will scan their irises, rather than swiping a metro or bank card. Police officers will monitor these scans and track the movements of watch-listed individuals. “Fraud, which is a $50 billion problem, will be completely eradicated,” says Carter.

This video, taken from GRI’s website, shows how the system works:

Touching on the rather obvious privacy issues, Fast Company write:

For such a Big Brother-esque system, why would any law-abiding resident ever volunteer to scan their irises into a public database, and sacrifice their privacy? GRI hopes that the immediate value the system creates will alleviate any concern. “There’s a lot of convenience to this–you’ll have nothing to carry except your eyes,” says Carter, claiming that consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores. And he has a warning for those thinking of opting out: “When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in.”

…

When I asked Carter whether he felt the film was intended as a dystopian view of the future of privacy, he pointed out that much of our private life is already tracked by telecoms and banks, not to mention Facebook. “The banks already know more about what we do in our daily life–they know what we eat, where we go, what we purchase–our deepest secrets,” he says. “We’re not talking about anything different here–just a system that’s good for all of us.”

So there you have it. Facebook and all those loyalty cards are now being used as a precedent to create a complete panopticon.

via Gizmodo | thanks for the tip-off Cat Vincent!

Lurker SneakyLil left a link to this in our comments:

I have only read Pinker’s How The Mind Works, but I believe most of his work to be well worth checking out.

What I would like to pick up and extend on are his comments on how ‘cosmopolitanism’ and Peter Singer’s ‘expanding circle’ have helped erode our feafulness of the Unknown Other, through reading about and understanding cultures and people we don’t see in the world around us. As my friend David Forbes says, There Is No They.

Our increasing connectedness, and ease of making new connections, is the great benefit of technologies such as Twitter. I daily read the stories of people on every continent on this planet and above it (thanks to tweets coming in from the residents of the ISS).

I would also point to people’s further awareness of their place of ‘privilege’ through tagging their tweets #firstworldproblems. I know it can seem a tad trite at times, and it’s often just a way for people to feel better about bitching about their iPods or Macs. But then think back to your classic literature and remember just how insular and self obsessed some of these great works seem now; completely obsessed with Upper Class Problems. Yes, I’m looking at you Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde!

So tweet away and tag them guilt free.. but do try to ever expand your circle, there’s enough inward facing collectives out there today (fuck you Glenn Beck!), let’s shake things up and dare to join hands across timezones and yes, even generational limits (I dare to believe not all Boomers are evil!).

via 80% of the humans I follow on Twitter.

From textually.org:
Swedish software developer, The Astonishing Tribe, is testing a iPhone application called Reconiizr that will enable the user to find names and numbers of complete strangers.

The user simply has to take a picture of a person and hit the ‘Recognize’ button.

The photo is then compared to shots on social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter before personal information, which can include phone numbers, addresses and email addresses, is sent to the user.

The app works on phones with a camera of five or more megapixel resolution

Via textually.org.

So last week the Burj Khalifa in Dubai was opened, the latest building to be qualified as the world’s tallest. It cost something like 1.5 billion dollars to construct and is basically a vertical city. In fact:

A firm of Chicago architects have designed it so that those who so wish will never have to leave, or even descend below the 108th floor.

That level is the top floor of residential apartments. For work, you can go to the offices upstairs – anywhere up to the 160th floor. To eat, you can visit the restaurant on the 122nd and to exercise, you can use the gym on the 123rd, about 440 metres up. The gym has both an indoor and, unnervingly, an outdoor swimming pool.

To prevent the high-flying yet enclosed life from becoming dull, the tower’s developers have a solution – at least for the young. The Burj intends to host the world’s highest nightclub, 20 floors higher still than the gym.

Back in May, 2008 two men snuck in and base jumped off it. This is their story:

P.S – not sure if you suffer from vertigo? Check out the view from the very top.

In this provocatively titled lecture, from the very aptly named Festival of Dangerous Ideas , Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration:

…examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design.

Which is a nice way of saying he makes a strong case for meddling in the genes of our children, and more importantly, can now identify just which ones to tweak.

This is nugenics kids, and it’s shit scary.

(OK, it would be slightly less creepy if he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket like a cape)

Watch on and be afraid;  sooner or later a Government somewhere is going to try this!

The QnA starts mid-way through the second video and is particularly good, in that most of the questions you will have are actually asked by the audience.

thanks to my buddy The Dingo Strategy for the tip-off!

Related:

• Nick Bostrom on existential risks and posthumanity

A gentle reminder that the social sites you frequent on the net shouldn’t be your only concern for data mining:

Dr. Michael Birnhack of TAU’s Faculty of Law and Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren from the University of Haifa recently completed a comprehensive study on information privacy laws in Israel and found compelling reasons for lawmakers everywhere to take notice. “Our research from Israel can serve as a case study of the shortcomings of a comprehensive data protection program,” says Dr. Birnhack.

“It’s not just sites like Facebook and Twitter that should cause concern,” he continues. “It’s all the trivial things that are collected about us that we’re not protected against.”
….
A health insurance provider doesn’t need to see your medical records to understand the state of your family’s health. It can learn just as much by looking at your grocery bill. “If you use a discount card at a supermarket, information on your purchases is added to a database. If you shop for halal or kosher products, your religion can be inferred, and the purchases of fatty or gluten-free foods can provide an indicator of your family’s overall health.”

Federal legislation in the U.S. regulates for some 15 different kinds of specific data sets, such as health data and credit histories, but not for information collected by club and discount cards or by commercial Web sites. And it’s more difficult to write a law to secure confidentiality in those areas, says Dr. Birnhack.

“Unless there are specific laws in place, this personal digital information is up for grabs. It can be bought and sold between governments and private companies, which can then conduct data mining and analysis on it and sell the results to third parties,” he explains.

Like Europe, Canada has a universal informational privacy policy, but U.S. data collection and dissemination regulation is more limited. Justice system lawyers are currently debating the issue of informational privacy, and Dr. Birnhack suggests that they look to Canada’s law as a good way to protect privacy. “Canada has the best data protection regime in the world,” he says. “It’s very powerful.”

Via sciencedaily.com.

An illegal surgical mashup:

A company called Stryker Biotech was in court last week defending a bone-growth product it sold for years, despite reports that it would “drift” in the body, causing bones to grow in random locations.

To boost sales of a product called OP-1 Implant with a bone-setting filler called Calstrux. The mixture was not approved by the FDA, and in fact OP-1 was only supposed to be used on a rare bone disease, not on people who simply needed to have their bones knit together fast. Surgeons were urged by Stryker to shape the OP-1/Calstrux paste into a “tootsie roll” or “vienna sausage” shape and implant it. Unfortunately, the substance often broke down and drifted through patients’ bodies. Bids of sprouting bone that looked like “oatmeal” or “white sesame seeds” would appear far from the site of injury where the substance had been implanted.

The product has excellent application possibilities, too bad about the drift issue. Link via io9.com.

John T. Unger, creator of Artisanal Firebowls, is being sued in federal court by an imitator who wants to continue to make knockoffs of Ungers’ original art.

I need your help. My original art has been copied by a manufacturer who is now suing me in federal court to overturn my existing copyrights and continue making knockoffs. I have a strong case, a great lawyer and believe that if I can continue to defend myself, the case will be resolved in my favor. If I run out of funds before we reach trial, a default judgment would be issued against me and could put me out of business. I don’t believe my opponent can win this case in court and I don’t believe he really intends to try. I believe his goal is to use strong-arm litigation tactics to force me to keep spending money or risk losing my copyrights — not by true adjudication, but by default if he is able to outspend me.

Note, since the knockoff company initiated the lawsuit first, the default judgment will be entered in the knockoff company’s favor. Fighting in court takes time, but most importantly, money. Lawyers are expensive. He’s already spent 50K out of pocket so far, but attempts to settle have been unsuccessful.

Seeking a judicial ruling in federal court will cost more than any artist or small business can afford on it’s own, but attempts at settlement have been unsuccessful. I am holding a fundraising sale of my artwork to finance a defense in court. If you can contribute to the fund or share this story with others to help raise awareness, it would mean the world to me.

Money aside, this is an important judicial situation for artists, as the US Copyright Office approved Ungers’ designs as sculptural artwork and awarded him certificates of copyright as the originator of these designs. The law can not and should not be eroded further, but few artists have the money to defend their rights in court. This is a chance to do so now. Please spread the word!

Link via Warren Ellis, via twitter.

Brain thoughts:

Perhaps most perplexing is the question of legal responsibility. If someone wearing a neural prosthesis were to punch someone, who is to blame? The action may have been deliberate, in which case the patient is to blame, or the chip may have been malfunctioning and the responsibility would lie with the manufacturer. Discovering where the truth lay would be no easy task. The law has had trouble catching up with the self-parking car, never mind an electronically controlled limb gone wild.

From the article Bionic brain chips could overcome paralysis, via newscientist. com.

From New Scientist:

Stem cell tourism – patients paying for treatment at illegal “guerrilla” clinics – continues to be a lucrative racket. Police in Hungary last week arrested four individuals they suspect of running an illegal stem cell treatment clinic in Budapest.

Reuters reported the police saying that the treatments were unproven, based on stem cells taken from embryos or aborted fetuses, and cost as much as $25,000 per person.

Gabor Bucsek, leading the police investigation, was quoted as saying that the arrests were “on suspicion of a banned use of the human body”.

More details here.

via BoingBoing

For crowd control, when a single taser won’t do:

The Shockwave is meant to “de-escalate/defuse violent crowd/riot situations,” although I have a feeling that if you Taser the first wave of a crowd, it might get a lot more rowdy — especially if they see that your Shockwave is a one-shot device, or three at the most (plus you can duck).

Photo and words via crunchgear.com.

Forget the geese control it’s designed to do: if it could be developed beyond the few shots it makes, crowd control would take on a whole new meaning.

The people who think the Kindle is the way of the future have gotten a very public wake-up call this week:

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.

In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they’d been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people’s devices and refund them the money they’d paid.

An uproar followed, with outraged customers pointing out the irony that Amazon was deleting copies of a novel about a fascist media state that constantly alters history by changing digital records of what has happened. Amazon’s action flies in the face of what people expect when they purchase a book. Under the “right of first sale” in the U.S., people can do whatever they like with a book after purchasing it, including giving it to a friend or reselling it. There is no option for a bookseller to take that book back once it’s sold.

Now that the public is up in arms over the Kindle deletions, Amazon is once again promising good behavior. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told reporters:

We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.

That “in these circumstances” bit doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Sounds like books will be removed again under other (undefined) circumstances.

Regardless of whether you believe Amazon’s promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you’re reading and when – and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?

Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer – hopefully a computer that isn’t connected to the internet.

Photo and words via io9.com.

On the Internet, no one knows if your’re a dog, or so I’m told.  But does President Obama’s newly announced “Cyberspace strategy” herald a possible end to the days of anonymity (or for that matter Anonymous) on the internet?

The answer is, “Possibly”.

Along with his press conference, today listing Cyber-Security as a national security priority, the White House also released the 75 page “Cyberspace Policy Review”.  It all seems pretty straightforward, answering basic national security, infrastructure and financian concerns about various “cyber threats”.  (The validity of a lot of these threats is, of course, up for debate, but isn’t what I’m looking to address here.)   However, buried in the text is a somewhat scary bit of policy jargon:

10.  Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

Now, to be frank, there’s a few scary bits throughout the document.  There’s a lot of wording that could support the growing of walled gardens in the private and public sector and the promise of more government regulation of the internet in the United States, but that bit sticks out to me.

An “identity management vision” is a means of regulating and more importantly authenticating your identity online.   This would mean the creation of some sort of regulatory agent that can assist in the establishment of authenticity standards in the hopes of allowing federal agencies the ability to tell if sexb0mb29@gmail.com, Captain Swing on myspace, and chimplover35 who comments on Digg are all in fact the same individual.  It’s, theoreticaly, the end of anonnimity on the internet.  (At least the US bits.)  Obviously it’s not the first time the US Federal government has shown an interest in policing identity on the internet, and it probably won’t be last, but it doesn’t bode well.

Io9’s Annalee Newitz has an interesting (and likely) take on the likelyhood of indentity policing ending up in the hands of a private sector company:

And here’s where my not-so-wild speculation about Facebook identities comes in. Many companies have turned to Facebook as an “identity management” system (including Gawker Media), allowing people to log into their services using their Facebook identity. The reason is simple: Most people only have one Facebook identity, and they stick with it. There’s a general notion that your Facebook identity is your authentic identity, or at least an identity that you keep over time, and that its characteristics can be traced back to who you are in real life. Therefore, having you log into every web service, from io9 comments to Digg to (possibly in the future) Paypal, is a way of managing your identities. Instead of having a separate identity for each of those services, you have one. Easy to manage, easy to trace.

Why shouldn’t Obama’s cyberczar just cut a deal with Facebook (and maybe a few other social networks like LinkedIn) and turn those profiles into your authentic identities? So you can send mail and buy things using your Facebook ID, and that’s how you’ll be tracked. Hey, you’re already on Facebook right? And you can set your profile to “private.” So it’s easy and “privacy enhancing.” (Never mind how easy it is to get around those privacy settings – pay no attention to that black hat behind the curtain.)

The scenario I’m describing is, in essence, how the Social Security Card became the twentieth century’s identity management system starting in the 1930s. These cards were not originally intended as ID cards, or as a way to authenticate your true identity. They were just a way to manage government assistance to those who needed it. But they became an ID card simply because everyone in the US had been issued one. When the government and businesses needed a way to track people’s identities, it became the easy choice. Showing your social security card meant that you couldn’t just come up with random new names for yourself every time you signed a form or took a job.

Though people in the US now think of the Social Security Card as the “obvious” form of ID, it took years for it to evolve from a simple social assistance card to an “identity management vision.”

Just as the (currently, temporarily scrapped) National ID card system would have been carried on the backbone of private interests, it’s entirely likely that any form of identity policing on the internet would end up being, by and large, maintained by a pre-existing entity in the private sector.   At first glance, a Facebook/US Government partnership seems unlikely, but does it really?   Newitz is right in claiming that this is exactly what happened with the Social Security Card.  This little white and blue piece of paper that most Americans posess quickly became a universal form of ID even though it was never intended to act as such.  (And in fact the card insists that a SSN is not an ID.)     And there are many, many companies that are currently using Facebook as identity sourcing or are looking at doing so.

Why not link your email addresses and your paypal accounts and your amazon information and your bank information to your Facebook account.  It’s safe and private, right?   While you’re at it, why not link your biometric information to your email account to your facebook account?  (Here’s the fun part — a lot of people already do that, and expect to see more push for email-based biometric security in the next year.)

Facebook is just one likely candidate for an increasingly likely scenario, and that scenario is one in which the powerful anonymizing factor of the internet is slowly reduced via public-private partnerships.  Partnerships which will be based on “convienence” and public safety.

On the bright side, Obama claims that he still supports net neutrality:

“Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not include — I repeat, will not include — monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic,” he said. “We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the internet as it should be, open and free.”

But those aren’t very comforting words when they’re released next to a document that encourages us to look back to the cold war, and discussed the importance of selling the idea of a national security cyber-threat to the American People.  It’s easy to say “I remain firmly committed to net neutrality…” but harder to accomplish when your policy documents outline how to convince the Internet-using populace  to allow internet regulations and promotes solidifying “who is in charge” of the internet.  (Those are just a few of the gems I noticed on a quick skim.)

Am I being reactionary?  Maybe a little.  But while the Obama adminstration has talked a good game regarding electronic civil liberties, he certainly hasn’t actually backed up the talk with actions, yet.  In fact, he’s done just the opposite with his support of enhanced wireless wiretapping powers and his appointment of MPAA/RIAA and staunch anti-P2P advocate Joe Biden as his VP.    While I’m not quite ready to go down to my local teabaggers meeting just yet, It’s obvious that electronic privacy is going to be an interesting minefield to watch Obama walk through.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.  Except Facebook.  And Linkdin.  And the FTC and LexisNexis and the CIA and the NSA and SEC.  Oh, and 4Chan.

“I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,” the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.

She has not yet been formally charged, but if convicted could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine up to $5,000.

Players in “Maple Story” raise and manipulate digital images called “avatars” that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting against monsters and other obstacles.

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.

From CNN.com

Via Pink Tentacle comes word of another bit of the future leaking through: the case of the “murdered” sex doll; a doll so realistic that it wasn’t until “forensic pathologists began to unwrap the “corpse” to perform the post-mortem, they realized it was actually a state-of-the-art sex doll.”

According to investigators, the man had lived with the sophisticated doll for several years after his wife passed away, but decided to part with her after making plans to move in with one of his children. “It seems he grew attached to the doll over the years,” said the chief investigator. “He was confused about how to get rid of her. He thought it would be cruel to cut her up into pieces and throw her out with the trash, so he proceeded to dump her illegally.”

The man, who regrets his lifelike doll was mistaken for a corpse, now faces fines for violating Japan’s Waste Management Law.

via BoingBoingGadgets.

See Also:

• How to make a robot girlfriend for less than $200

Pollen and grit are the components of a new coating for gun cartridges that UK researchers hope will help to identify criminals that use firearms.

Under their scheme, batches of cartridges would be labelled with unique “nanotags”, invisible to naked eye, designed to attach themselves to hands, gloves and clothing of anyone that handles a cartridge. Some of the tags would remain on the spent cartridge casing.

The tags could perform a similar, but more authoritative role to the specks of unintended explosives residue sometimes used to tie people to guns or crimes.

The nanotags are made from pollen, and a mix of grains of crystal oxides such as zirconia, silica and titanium oxide. Using varying combinations of crystal and pollen grains, it is possible to make large numbers of unique tags.

“The most challenging part of the project was nanoengineering a coating robust enough to withstand the [high temperatures of] firing and that would still release the tags when touched,” he added.

Sermon says that the tags are designed to be compatible with current cartridge manufacturing processes and could be implemented within 12 months of companies or government supporting their introduction.

In addition to the tags, the researchers are working on a way to have gun cartridges retain skin cells from anyone that handle them, for later DNA-based forensic analysis. Micro-scale grit can effectively trap cells and protect DNA from the heat of firing. Today, cartridges are smooth and rarely retain DNA or fingerprints.

The team is also looking to apply that technique to knives so they retain DNA more reliably.

Link via newscientist.com.

From NaviGadget:

Spanish brand Keruve has come out with a GPS device designed to keep an eye out for Alzheimer’s patients.

The system consists of a special bracelet and a PSP like handheld device that can show the location of the person wearing the bracelet. Speaking of the bracelet; it is water resistant and it can only be taken off using a special tool.

According to Engadget “it can also apparently fall back on cell tower triangulation (otherwise known as A-GPS) provide a location when regular GPS is unavailable”.

So what we have here is a device perfect not just for finding your favourite senile uncle, but also for any would-be stalker, controlling spouse, un-trusting parent, or anyone else who just can’t bare to not know where someone is.

That’s the Con side. The Pro being, you could stalk yourself, ie lifelogging. And I am sure this could be incorporated into some neat RL/ARG games.

via medGadget

The first time I ever heard of Shenzhen and the “Special Economic Zone” was when I was working for an international information clearinghouse that should remain nameless. It came up when I was facing the possibility of transferring to our Pan-Asia branch and living there part time. However, over the years, other than being the place where, chances are good, any random bit of tech you have on your desk was manufactured (your iPhone’s been there, as have many other Apple and IBM products, Wal-Mart items and the like) Shenzhen only popped back up on my radar a few months ago as one of the birthplaces of the new surveillance culture.

Chinese officials call it call it “The Golden Shield” and while it’s ostensibly a project of the Chinese Government, it’s being developed by familiar companies like IBM, AT&T, Nortel, Cisco, General Electric, Yahoo, Honeywell, and according to some reports, Google. What the Golden shield comprises is the largest integrated surveillance network in existence. It combines the existing “Great Firewall” which filters almost all net content into China with the “Safe Cities” initiative which includes cameras in all internet cafes, many entertainment venues, and in many cities (2 million cameras in Shenzhen alone by 2010) and a massive photo and biometric information database of all of China’s 1.3 billion citizens.

It’s a massive and lucrative project which is why Western companies are flocking to build a better democracy-free future for China, while here in the US they continue to sell a “freedom friendly” image. Meanwhile the “Golden Shield” has already been tested on examples like the Lhasa riots which recently left anywhere from 16 to 100 people dead as monks clashed with police. The Shield allowed CCTV footage to yield become identities and then locations of many monks and passersby involved in the rioting allowing Chinese police to quickly round up hundreds of people allegedly involved. The same security system is being used, of course, to protect the upcoming 2008 Olympics as well.

As Naomi Klein writes in the Rolling Stone article that many of my statistics are pulled from, these are the kind of companies doing business with China on the sly in order to testbed a new generation of biometrics technologies:

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it “captures” more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.”

The good news, though is that the American Government, as they learn about these technologies is only too eager to strip mine them for ideas:

The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was “mined for ideas” by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a “virtual, centralized grand database” that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. “It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for,” Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: “Operation Noble Shield.”

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for “face prints,” then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Check out the rest of that excellent article for far more detail on the topic of surveillance culture in China. My goal isn’t to poke at China in particular. For example the draconian national firewall around our old friend Dubai (as well as Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) is built and administered by U.S. based company Secure Computing a.k.a. Smart Filter. Now leaving aside the possibly vastly hypocritical clash behind some of their senior staff’s personal lives (Google boingboing, adult baby, and smartfilter, if you care to) and the technologies they develop to limit internet access for others, once again we have a Western company (this one more public about it since internet censorship is their raison d’etre) implementing and developing censorship technologies overseas.

What prompts this little link-filled rant, then? Well, today the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed. This act, for those of you playing along at home or abroad, first of all offers up immunity to Verizon, AT&T, and several other telecom companies for their part in assisting the National Security Agency with warrentless wiretaps before and after the 9/11 attacks. The act then proceeds to arguably weaken oversight of domestic wiretaps and information collection. The Bill passed with overwhelming support, granting retroactive protections for invasions of privacy by a collection of telecom companies.

These are some of the same telecom companies and their interests that, as we’ve seen elsewhere, have their hands on the rudder of a different Web 2.0. One that resembles the satirical USIdent integrated internet/entertainment/surveillance solution from Southland Tales more than it does the Web 2.0 of a thousand blog entries. While it’s easy to see mainly the utopian or fantastic applications of a lot of the technologies we discuss and trumpet on here, so many of them have an equal footing in a parallel version of the future being grown as we speak by some of the same companies produce the cool new future gadgets.

This is one of the reasons I take the “find outbreaks of the future” mandate so seriously. First of all, outbreaks of the future are not always pretty; but secondly, by keeping our eyes open and aggregating this kind of information, we’re at least increasing the odds of being able to pick our own futures. Because honestly? I don’t want the futures that the people are offering “liberation” with jokes about surveillance are selling.

At least, that’s what I tell myself at night.