There’s a BBC article that was posted this past Saturday entitled Big Brother is watching us all. I am leary of reading traditional media articles about privacy because many of them are inflammatory and most seem to provide and distorted view of what most reasonable privacy advocates are actually advocating. However, I was curious because it was the BBC and London is well-known to have extensive surveillance camera networks.

Despite my misgivings, the article does describe some technologies in a rational and accurate manner. I don’t know if the technologies described are right around the corner or if it will still take decades for them to be functional. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. However, I do know that we’re nowhere close to being able to understand as a society the implications that some of these things, when functional, will have for us.

Of course, there is a great example of the traditional tripe usually found in mainstream media articles. It comes at the end of the article:

Using radio waves, you point [the device at] a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side. [Ian Kitajima's] company, Oceanit, is due to test it with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq next year, and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates.

“First, you can tell whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield,” said Ian.

“But it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”

He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that’s what’s ahead.”

This is exactly the reason I dislike mainstream media articles about technology. No, there will not be a magic radio wave device that can read your mind and determine what you’re actually thinking in the next ten years. This is hogwash. One of the many reasons why is simple. The first step in building a device that can determine what someone is actually thinking is creating an algorithm or process that can determine what someone is actually thinking. Anyone who has ever been married can tell you how successful humans are at that sort of thing.

A quickly beating heart is indicative of many disparate things. Most of these are not “I am preparing to kill whomever is staring at me through my wall.” However, if you are a member of a SWAT team holding a device such as this in one hand and a machine gun in the other… Well, let’s just say that a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

A similar situation is described in Blink by Malcom Gladwell where a police officer had to make a split second decision based on bad instincts. The good news is that training can improve split second decisions in police officers. Thus, it is possible that proper training in the use of technology can prevent abuses and wasteful spending which might result from misunderstanding technology. The bad news is that we may not be able to train those in decision making positions rapidly enough to keep up with technology marketers (and clueless mainstream media journalists) who are trying to sell the next miracle device that will solve all your security problems.