perfidy

In an article for Wired News, Bruce Schneier writes of the challenges the Supreme Court will face in the future as a result of our swiftly advancing technology.

Recent advances in technology have already had profound privacy implications, and there's every reason to believe that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Roberts is 50 years old. If confirmed, he could be chief justice for the next 30 years. That's a lot of future.

Here are some examples. Advances in genetic mapping continue, and someday it will be easy, cheap and detailed -- and will be able to be performed without the subject's knowledge. What privacy protections do people have for their genetic map, given that they leave copies of their genome in every dead skin cell that they leave behind? What protections do people have against government actions based on this data? Against private actions?

Should a customer's genetics be considered when granting a mortgage, or determining its interest rate?

Surveillance is another area where technological advances will raise new constitutional questions. I've written about wholesale surveillance, the ability of the government to collect data on everyone and then search that data looking for certain people. We're already seeing this kind of surveillance by automatic license plate readers and aerial photographs.

In the future, this will become more personal. New technologies will be able to peer through walls, under clothing, beneath skin, perhaps even into the activity of the brain. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) rhetorically asked Roberts: "Can microscopic tags be implanted in a person's body to track his every movement.... Can brain scans be used to determine whether a person is inclined toward criminal or violent behavior?" What should be the limits on what the police can do without a warrant?

These issues will be coming to the court in less than a decade. Even more outlandish issues will follow quickly on their heels. In the not to distant future, computers will attain the raw computational power of the human brain. If we create a machine intelligence is it a citizen, and subject to the same rights as you and I, or is it merely subject to copyright law? Neuroscientists and programmers are working to reverse engineer the brain. If you scan your brain, is it you, or are you you? What rights does a simulated animal have - we are working on that right now. If you unplug a simulation of a cat, can the SPCA come after you?

Beyond the world of artificial intelligence, steroid use will seem on a level with steam engines compared to advanced genetic engineering. If you reengineer your nervous system and musculature for greater strength and speed and hti 200 home runs, do you get an asterisk next to your name in the record books?

And what happens when advanced materials technology arrives? Even short of actual, full-on replicating assembler nanotechnology, it is not hard to imagine that home fabricators could become as common as home laser printers. Will the free hardware movement be distributing open source specifications for material goods? What happens when all property becomes intellectual property, and you can have any physical good with merely the software specifications and a pile of dirt? If the cost of materials becomes functionally zero - as it already is for text, software and media - intellectual property disputes will determine the nature of our entire economy.

Further, specifications for weapons and explosives distributed over the internet could allow miscreants to "print" guns, bombs or whatever right from their home fabricator.

Computer and information technology shows no sign in slowing down, in fact even the rate of increase is increasing. With computer power doubling in just over a year, every year, how long before ubiquitous monitoring, in real time, is possible? Can you outwit a million supercomputers with sophisticated and self-learning pattern matching software? Probably not.

These are only a few of the issues that will be before us in the next two decades. The pace of change is accelerating, and the world of ten years from now will be more strange than the world of a hundred years ago. It's going to be a wild ride.