I've been seeing a lot of news about sensors lately. Some good - some bad. Our good friend the Internet enables little sensors to talk to one another. They can also talk to databases. Why should this concern anyone? Have you ever used a public restroom where you didn't have to touch anything? The toilet flushes for you, and the faucet comes to life at the wave of a hand. Progress. Take that same familiar infrared sensor and add some bells and whistles to it. A thermometer maybe. Innocuous enough sure, but that's not all you can add to it. If DARPA, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security get their way, our little sensors will be able to tell a database who drove what car how fast down what street at what time - not to mention what parking lot they pulled into.

Get those sensors out of the toilets and onto the exteriors of public buildings! It's all for security of course. Once these sensors are distributed throughout America's cities the Department of Homeland Security would like to connect them all to a "grand, centralized database." No, I am not making this up. This database would then be searched and cross-referenced until patterns matching predetermined criteria occurred. Folks, I'm a conspiracy enthusiast - not that there's anything wrong with that - so I speak from experience when I say that if you look hard enough - at a big enough set of data - the patterns WILL occur. They'll be dead wrong the vast majority of the time, but they'll be good enough for warrant totting ham-and-eggers to cover their asses with when they start arresting every poor slob who by some freak statistical anomaly happens to fit a threat-profile as defined by John Ashcroft. Better not visit those websites that sell bongs anymore. Hell, now that every blog is indexed by google, I'd better not use the WORD bong in my blog. Or bomb. Or president.

So what's good about distributed sensors? Well those same data sets used by the DHS to nab would be terrorists can also be used to generate more accurate weather forecasts. They can also be used to track wildlife for behavior, population, and migration studies. And a whole slew of other nifty things. Click the links - you'll see the potential.

These sensors - and the database(s) they're connected to - will likely never be abused by the United States government to create a world-wide Total Information Awareness super-despotism, but a little insurance for us folks gathered around the bottom of the all-seeing, all-knowing pyramid of power wouldn't hurt.

I propose this: Since all of these sensors are web-enabled - make their data public domain. Deploy them, and open-up the Total Information Awareness database to the web developing public. Talk about revitalizing the economy - we'll have killer apps coming out of our asses. Not to mention the number of IT jobs that would be created to maintain such an infrastructure. If data is the new currency, and our government is creating the largest data mine ever conceived, shouldn't we have access to it? Google lets us play with their data for fun and profit. Will the United States of America?

Labels: darpa, technology, tia