Orwell in the news

Here's a creepy Microsoft project:
"... The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance
by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial
expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees
could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their
physiological state."
http://slashdot.org/articles/08/01/16/1427242.shtml
("...He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which
it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen...")

Here's a less intrusive but still mildly creepy plan for the SF Bay Area
subway:
"...will allow officers to better zoom in on suspicious people and items..."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/30/MNEOT2R0D.DTL

Here's a funny/sad surveillance-as-art project:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007...102030.

Not much public comment on the above, but evidently they'll pry
Californians' thermostats from their pleasantly warmed or chilled dead
hands...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/16/BARNUGIKF.DTL


Rgds/M

Martha Bridegam wrote...
> Here's a creepy Microsoft project:
> "... The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance
> by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial
> expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees
> could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their
> physiological state."

The technology can also monitor psychological states, and recent advances
in MRI imaging give scientists the power to detect specific types of
thoughts by measuring neural activity in different regions of the brain.
There is no reason to believe such monitoring can't be done remotely in
the near future, so that governments, employers, spies, and saboteurs
will have the ability to remotely identify an individual through a
biometrics database, identify his physiological state - including which
drugs he might be taking, and even get a pretty good idea what he is
thinking about. Orwell foresaw it all:

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"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth
and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to
solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being
is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people
in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as
scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter."
-- 1984
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