Speaking at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Harvard Computer Science Professor Margo Seltzer said that miniature mosquito drones will soon not only be able to perpetually monitor you but will be able to forcibly extract your DNA on behalf of government goons and insurance companies. “Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible…How we conventionally think of privacy is dead. We live in a surveillance state today.”
Fellow Harvard professor Sophia Roosth also warned that an era of “genetic McCarthyism” was on the way as a result of your personal genetic information being made available to government via ObamaCare electronic medical records.
Sightings of insect-sized micro drones have been occurring for years, but combined with the direction of genome sequencing , the pair make for a futuristic and potentially deadly mix. Such a device could be controlled from a great distance and is equipped with a camera, microphone. It could land on you and then use its needle to take a DNA sample.
Sound impossible? A small insect or a mosquito over your ear may now be much more than simply annoying. Those could easily be micro drones which now come in a swarm of bug-sized flying spies. The military is working to create a hard-to-detect surveillance drone that will operate with little or no direct human supervision in out of the way and adverse environments.
This is another step away from bulky heavily armed aerial vehicles or humanoid robots to a much smaller level of tiny remote-control devices. While current drones lack manoeuvrability, [can’t hover and move fast enough], these new devices will be able to land precisely and fly off again at speed. In addition to spying on American citizens and stealing DNA, the military hopes that one these tiny drones can prove a crucial tactical advantage in wars and could even save lives in disasters. They can also be helpful inside caves and barricaded rooms to send back real-time intelligence about the people and weapons inside.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the audience that the world wide web as an external concept will cease to exist. “There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it,” he added. “It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.” But when Schmidt speaks of sensors that will replace the Internet as a platform accessed only through an external device, he is talking about implantable brain chips.
Google engineer director Scott Huffman predicted in 2013 that within five years web users would have microphones attached to their ceilings and microchips embedded in their brains so that they could perform quicker internet searches. When asked if such a system would be more vulnerable to government surveillance, Huffman replied that people should just trust Google to protect their privacy. Google isn’t the most trustworthy of companies. They already allow NSA to data mine from their cloud at will.
But Tech entrepreneur Anthony Goldbloom told the elitists at the Forum Davos that young people no longer cared about surveillance issues and were perfectly willing to trade privacy for convenience. “People often behave better when they have the sense that their actions are being watched,” Goldboom said, invoking Orwell’s 1984. And the sad truth is, he’s probably right!
