SmartDust Sensorwebs 'Real Soon Now'

DeAshcroft writes "EE Times has a piece on progress with the four-year-old DARPA-conceived Smart Dust self-organizing sensor networks. Based on Berkeley's TinyOS and TinyDB open-source projects, the article reports several companies are demonstrating both military and civilian applications. Ars Technica adds background and commentary on issues not discussed in the EET article."

Comments

Oh man

[PhysicsGenius]

The dust I have is hard enough to get rid of. I don't want it to be smarter.

This is actually kind of scary. I mean, the advantage is that the enemy doesn't know their being spied on, right? So how soon until this is used for "civilian surveillance"? Next election I'm voting for Nadir.

Clean Room parade?

[Noryungi]

One possible solution to protect against smart dust would to create military buildings with a high internal atmospheric pressure: people who enter the building who create a draft directed at the outside, which should be enough to blow away "smart dust".

At least I hope so... If you cross Total Information Awareness and smart dust you have one scary scenario... =(

And even "clean" (high internal pressure) buildings don't help military units in the fields...

Re:Dusting of sensors

[Ralph Wiggam]

And detecting their presence wouldn't be that hard. Simple electronics would notice a large ammount of radiation being emitted from an empty field.

-B

Complete loss of privacy and safety?

[digital photo]

Okay... so basically, we're talking about particle sized sensors and a built-in networking capability. Sensors meaning heat, sound, light, and whatever else they need to orient themselves like GPS, orientation, etc.

So what's to prevent people from spreading this stuff in public washrooms/baths/changing rooms to spy on people while they undress?

What's to prevent this from being sprinkled onto unsuspecting passerbys and used to basically stalk them and their children?

What's to prevent this from being used on ATM machines or any other place where sensitive information needs to be kept secret from prying eyes and people who seek to commit fraud?

What's to prevent people from using this to gain insider information by spreading it in corporate meeting and board rooms while they are visiting, at production factories during a tour, or even at random hotel rooms for the heck of it?

What's to prevent the abuse of this technology?

I'm not saying the technology doesn't have great and beneficial uses. Military and Security uses come to mind. As does scientific research and observation. It can go a great way to help prevent spousal abuse and domestic violence, tell us when children ARE being abused or if fraud is being committed. It can even help to serve as an effective way of adding home security without all of the cameras. And help to monitor the weak and sickly who might otherwise not be monitored effectively through normal means.

I'm just left wondering whether or not this is a tool/technology which will essentially erradicate privacy.

A world without privacy.

[praksys]

I spent a little time wondering what it would be like living in a world with total surveilence - a world where someone could be watching or at least recording everything that happens. In some respects it doesn't actually look that bad.

No one would would be in any doubt about whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No crime would go unsolved. No one would expect to get away with cheating on their spouse. Lying in general would become far less common. There just wouldn't be much to lie about which couldn't be verified by someone who wanted to.

Of course you would have to get used to the idea that six billion people could, if they wanted to, watch you take a dump every morning. But somehow I suspect that the excitement of voyerism would wear off if every act became a public act. Who knows, maybe we would all be happier if there was no longer any point in maintaining a public mask to cover our private lives.

I worried at first that total surveilence would lend itself too well to totalitarianism. "No crime would go unsolved" really just means that if you do anything the state disapproves of then it would not go unnoticed. But then it occured to me that totalitarianism would have a hard time getting established if eveything happens in the public view. Politicians could not cut deals behind closed doors, the military could not plot coups, the state could not lie to the people about what it is doing.

Living in a world like this would be really different from living in the world as it is, and it would be uncomfortable to people like us who are used to a good deal of privacy. But it wouldn't necessarily be bad - just very different.

Of course total surveilence is not going to happen any time soon. What will happen is an increase in certain types of surveilence by certain people. The way I see it, the problem with this is that we might wind up with a world where the state can watch the people, but the people cannot watch the state, or a world where the US knows exactly what Iraq is up to, but no one knows exactly what the US is up to. This kind of world really would be bad.

So here is a suggestion. Perhaps instead of trying to stem the tide of surveilence, what we should do is try to make sure that it washes over everyone evenly. If the state has this technology, then push for the same technology to be made available to private citizens. If the state wants more information about the people, then push for a more open government, so that the people will also have more information about the state.

Re:A world without privacy.

[praksys]

Someone is watching. Someone is recording. His name is God.

I thought seriously about discussing this idea in my original post. A number of ethical theorists like Bentham and Locke thought that the idea of constant observation by God was a key part of moral consciousness. Religious people who take this idea seriously are always in a position of having to think about what their behavior would look like from God's perspective. Bentham actually proposed that prisons should be built, so that the inmates were literally under constant observation, in the hope that they would get into this habbit of thinking (his plan which he called the "panopticon" has actually be implemented in some places).

I am an athiest, but like Machiavelli I am willing to consider the possibility that religion might serve a useful social function even though it is strictly fiction. Still it seems to me that there are serious problems with the idea of grounding morality in religion. For one thing it is getting increasingly harder to maintain the fiction. For another thing, people who think that God is the source of all value are prone to forget that it is really individual human lives that matter. When that happens they tend to do horrible things even though they think God is watching.

Wouldn't it be better if we could really make it true that we will be held accountable for every action, and that it is our fellow hummans who will do the accounting?

Vunerability to hacking?

[l8apex]

I wonder what the potential for hacking these networks is? If they're running on low power, low performance devices, are they going to have robust encryption?

Even if you couldn't decrypt the signals, you could detect their presence.. which leads to a bunch of potential counter-measures: jam their communications with a bunch of RF noise, sweep a microwave beam to fry their circuits, the list goes on.

Interestingly enough, fairly low tech countermeasures could be used to combat this kind of high technology.