Artificial intelligence-gathering
The United States has six percent of the world's population, but has twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners.

By nessie

As each day passes, it becomes ever more difficult to feel optimistic about the future of our personal liberties. While paranoids lather themselves into panic over the real, but highly unlikely, possibility that they may be soon herded into barbed-wire-encrusted concentration camps, the grim reality slips them by. It slips most people by. The sad fact is, we may as well be prisoners already. Barbed wire is obsolete. The fences that hold us today are electronic.

This is not to say that traditional-style concentration camps are un-American. Far from it. The concentration camp, many would be surprised to learn, was not a Nazi invention. Nor was it, as some historians would have us believe, invented by the British in their war against the Boors. The Spanish used it in Cuba before the British built their first. But even they weren't the pioneers.

In 1863 Kit Carson forced thousands of Dineh (the people we call "Navajos") on the "Longest Walk" to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. It was a 500 hundred mile trek from Dinetah, where many had been slaughtered by Carson and his men. For five years, the Dineh were imprisoned at the fort. They were forced to dig holes in the ground for shelter. Many died. It was so costly to keep them locked up this way that American taxpayers finally objected: In 1868 those still alive trekked back to their ancient homelands.

Then there was Andersonville, where my own family lost two brothers. They were handsome lads, age 18 and 19. Being shown their pictures by my grandmother and told the story of how they died is one of my earliest childhood memories. More recently, in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which sent more than 110,000 people to "relocation" camps. They were imprisoned without trial for the crime of being of Japanese descent. Most were U.S. citizens. So don't let anyone tell you the Nazis learned it from the British, or that the British learned it from the Spanish, or that things like that can't happen here. Concentration camps are as American as apple pie and Chevrolet.

Today the United States has six percent of the world's population, but has twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners. Increasingly, our prisons are being privatized and their labor is reaching the marketplace. Slavery is back with a vengeance.

But how free are the rest of us? The short answer is: not very, and even that is for long. In part we can blame the ruthless and amoral plutocrats who rule us. In part we can blame our own stupidity and cowardice for failing to resist with sufficient vigor. In part we can blame technology.

The technology of enslavement is rapidly evolving. Its use is spreading quickly. A virtual Panopticon is rising up to hold us as no wire ever could. There is no longer need to concentrate us. Now the camp is everywhere. Don't say I never warned you.

Six months ago I told you how a type of artificial intelligence called Face Recognition Software (FRS) had been used at the Super Bowl. Fans who lined up to attend Super Bowl XXXV were, without their knowledge, standing in a virtual lineup. It was not an isolated incident. It now appears that the powers that be had been floating a trial balloon. Would the American people, long accustomed to believing that they are innocent until proven guilty, submit to being treated like suspects in a criminal case just to see a football game? Obviously the powers that be felt little confidence that we would. It was not until after Super Sunday had come and gone that we were told what had happened.

Six months passed. Our reaction was analyzed. Part of that reaction was my column of February 19, 2001. Part of it was your logging on to read what I said. Rest assured that both were part of the overall analysis. They must have been. Artificial intelligence has made Internet surveillance almost too cheap to meter. With AI assistance, the powers that be have drawn a chilling conclusion. There is enough of a chance that we will go along with it that have begun setting up permanent installations. The first one they told us about is right there in Tampa, Florida, where Super Bowl XXXV was held.

Face-It, the same FRS used at Super Bowl XXXV, is now linked to 36 cameras throughout the Centro Ybor entertainment complex and along East Seventh Avenue in Tampa. Images will be compared against a database of mug shots of people with active warrants. If Face-It decides there is an 85 percent chance you are a criminal, you can be stopped and questioned by a live cop. Thanks to tech support by Advanced Biometric Imaging, the once-not-so-fine line between a night on the town and standing in a police lineup has been blurred beyond recognition, at least for people in Tampa.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles, in what officials claim is an effort to prevent identity theft and driver's license fraud, is buying cameras that will map every driver's facial characteristics like a three-dimensional land chart. With the help of Polaroid, old driver's license photos will be scanned into a computer database using the new technology. Then, starting next July, new mugs will be compared with those on file to make sure people are who they say they are when they go to get or renew a Colorado driver's license. For what will the technology be used in the meantime? Coloradans are not being told.

Colorado – what a state. First it was the photo-radar vans snapping pictures of Denver-area speeders. Now this. The danger, of course, is that the technology could eventually be expanded to monitor the comings and goings of ordinary Coloradans. Even Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, a member of a state task force set up to craft legislation aimed at protecting privacy admitted, "Information obtained for one purpose is sometimes used for reasons that were not contemplated by people who set up the system to begin with."

In nearby Texas, roadside cameras have been used to catch the license plates of anyone crossing state lines at five locations along Texas' borders with Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. The Texas Transportation Institute then sent out a "confidential and optional" questionnaire, supposedly to help officials decide where to build new roads and to spend state highway money. The questionnaire is designed to find out the purpose of the trip – family reasons, shopping or work, for example. What software is used to analyze the questionnaires? Texans are not being told.

One Texan, outraged at this invasion of his privacy, was quoted in the Houston Chronicle. "You're trying to be the average citizen minding your own business, going to and fro, and you're being monitored by the state," he said. "It's hard to believe we're being monitored coming in and out of the state."

That an average citizen finds such behavior hard to believe is the scariest part of the story. It bodes greater ill for the future of liberty than does the technology itself. In part, we can blame the media. A truly free media would be on this story like white on rice. But the media is not free. It is as much a prisoner of the corporate-government complex as we are. Where are the front-page exposés and in-depth series on the mortal danger to liberty that automated surveillance presents? Why is the subject buried in back with the truss ads or glossed over and then quickly dropped?

Even these few articles tend to be propaganda. Some aren't subtle at all. Consider this quote, supposedly from an average citizen, embedded in the St. Petersburg Times account of Face-It's installation in Tampa:

"That's awesome," said Wanda Souders, 35, a caterer. "If you don't have anything to worry about, it won't bother you. As far as any invasion of rights – if you're breaking the law, your rights are kind of dissolved."

There is nothing wrong with reporting such ignorance of our rights on the part of an average citizen. But is it not also the duty of responsible journalists to correct such misinformation in the very next sentence of the article? Who gains when the average citizen neither knows what our rights are nor how quickly they are being eroded by software development? Hint: It's not the average citizen.

Artificial intelligence is more than a hit summer movie. It is fast becoming the virtual watchtower of the global labor camp we call home. By fast, I do mean fast. The capabilities of computers to reason are growing exponentially. Soon, very soon, computers will be "smarter" than we are. As premier artificial intelligence maven Ray Kurzweil points out in his new book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (ISBN 0-14-02-8202-5), ". . . it took about ninety years to achieve the first MIP (Million Instructions per Second) per thousand dollars. Now we add an additional MIP per thousand dollars every day."

Kurzweil then outlines in meticulous and well-documented detail some of what this will mean for all of us in the very near future. It is nothing short of astounding.

Ray Kurzweil is more than just another futurist. If the patents he holds are any indication, he is the Thomas Edison of artificial intelligence. His predictions in the field are not to be taken lightly. So far he has almost always been right. He is also an optimist. He sees the bright side well, and it is very bright indeed.

But there is a dark side, too. It's far darker than the mere ability of the techno-fascist police state to put innocent people into a virtual lineup without their consent or knowledge. Beyond surveillance lies tracking, behavior prediction, political repression and social engineering on a global scale.

At least the use of artificial intelligence in surveillance is now, at last, beginning to be made public. We've been warned. It greatly behooves us all to pay attention, to extrapolate, and to begin to develop effective counter measures.

The nessie files runs alternate Mondays.

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