Spy Fly

opencity writes "CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."

Comments

Worst Nightmare is on its way

[heretic108]

Once they perfect the fly, next it's ants, cockroaches etc.

Ants completely immune to insecticide, crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room.

Ants crawling into keyboards and sensing keystrokes; into monitors and recording displays;

Insects in cars, flying around the sky, networking and collecting data.

Once the prototypes are worked out, and production is tooled up, it'll be viable to implement 100% surveillance of a entire resident populations.

Or, with extreme micromechanical advances, it'll be devices smaller than a human cell, resistant to human antibodies, that can enter via the nasal passages, travel through the bloodstream, sneak past the blood-brain barrier, and embed into various centres around the brain, including the speech centre. Thus such devices will have the ability to read a portion of human thought (the verbal compenent at least), encode verbal thoughts into a data stream, and use the brain's electricity to power a transmitter, sending the encoded thoughts out to external surveillance insects for collection into government databases.

George Orwell's coined word 'thoughtcrime' will take on a much more literal meaning.

This is one of the most frightening developments I've ever seen. The only thing that might hold it in check is an underground movement of people developing technological counter-measures.

Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy

[ScottBob]

A long time ago they had a series of kid's science fiction books about a kid inventor named Danny Dunn, and one book, Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy was about a robotic dragonfly that could fly around and spy on people. He flew it with a helmet and gloves that foretold of modern virtual reality, because he could feel in his gloves whatever the dragonfly landed on. He ended up destroying it in fears the technology would land in the wrong hands and be used for sinister (Orwellian?) purposes. Anybody else remember reading this one?

Re:Coldwar was pointless

[thales]

The Soviet state was blataly expanionist. It openly admitted that it's long term goals were to introduce Soviet style gonernments in all nations. It openly admited that control of nations outside western Europe and North America would place it in a postion to control the NATO nations, without a war if possible, with a war if nessacary.

The USA responed to the Soviet attempt to outflank Nato through control of areas that were not part of the NATO alliance. Failure to respond to the threat of Soviet Imperlism would have been as suicidal as The UK and France's attempts at appeasing Hitler almost turned out to be.

Standing Idly by while a hostile state that has made it's intentions to amass enough power to overcome you clear is an incredible act of foolishness.

The USSR's policies started the Cold War. It's insistance on attempts to export it's form of government made ending it impossible.

The "end the Cold War" nonsense in the west was seldom anything other than a attempt to end any attempt to foil Soviet Imperalism without even pretending to ask for anything in return from the Soviet Union, and ammounted to a call for an abject surrender to an Expansionist Power.