Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

These people are drunk– literally drunk– with power. This is shocking news, yet it’s being hailed as the next best thing to the atom bomb. It’s “smart dust”: teeny-tiny wireless sensors as small or smaller than a grain of rice, sent out across the planet with the intention on monitoring EVERYTHING.

‘Smart dust’ aims to monitor everything

Smart dust researchers say their theory of monitoring the world — however it’s realized — will benefit people and the environment.

More information is better information, Pister said.

“Having more sensors improves the efficiency of a system and reduces the demand and reduces waste,” he said. “So all of that is just straight goodness.”

Hartwell, the HP researcher, says the only way people can combat huge problems like climate change and biodiversity loss is to have more information about what’s going on.

“Frankly, I think we have to do it, from a sustainability and environmental standpoint,” he said.

Even though the first application of HP’s “Central Nervous System for the Earth” project will be commercial, Hartwell says the motives behind smart dust are altruistic.

“People ask me what my job is, and I say, well, I’m going to save the world,” he said…..

Even when deployed for science or the public, some people still get a Big Brother feeling –the uncomfortable sense of being under constant, secret surveillance — from the idea of putting trillions of monitors all over the world.

“It’s a very, very, very huge potential privacy invasion because we’re talking about very, very small sensors that can be undetectable, effectively,” said Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate.

“They are there in such numbers that you really can’t do anything about them in terms of easy countermeasures.”

That doesn’t mean that researchers should stop working on smart dust. But they should be mindful of privacy as the work progresses, he said.

Pister said the wireless frequencies that smart dust sensors use to communicate — which work kind of like Wi-Fi — have security built into them. So the data is public only if the person or company that installed the sensor wants it to be, he said.

“Clearly, there are security concerns and privacy concerns,” he said, “and the good news is that when the radio technology was being developed for this stuff, it was shortly after all of the big concerns about Wi-Fi security. … We’ve got all the security tools we need underneath to make this information private.”

Further privacy concerns may arise if another vision for smart dust comes true. Some researchers are looking into making mobile phones into sensors.

In this scenario, the billions of people roaming the Earth with cell phones become the “smart dust.”

I don’t have “security” concerns, I have “tyrant” concerns. I’m sure when Wilbur and Orville Wright took off on that famous first flight at Kitty Hawk, they had no idea the destruction the contraption would mean to Nagasaki and Hiroshima residents. I’m sure when Remington invented his amazing gun, he didn’t do it for the sake of lusty warmongers with their AK-47s. Man ALWAYS twists “good technology” for evil purposes, without fail. But technology isn’t even being invented for good purposes anymore, to be twisted later. It’s being invented already twisted, to control as many people as possible. And for what cause? Why?

All very sad.