Regulate Implant Technology before Human Rights abuses become common practice
The advances in some areas of the human brain sciences and the possible threats for the future became apparent to Ellen M. McGee and Gerald Q. Maguire already in 1999. They talked about ear- and eye implants but also about more advanced implants and sensors in the environment able to spy on the human being and to control behavior and the human mind. The same ethical questions arising then are still very important today.
Since 1999, the progresses in the implant technology happened very fast. It is possible today to connect a human brain to a computer, creating today’s cyborgs.
Technical innovation, scientists claim, are neither good nor bad, but how it is used and the moral and ethical consequences arising from the use of the technology in unethical ways. Today, the technology and its applications are still completely or partially unregulated. There are still no laws that admit recognize or regulate how and to what extent human brain functions can or cannot be used, leaving a very open and huge range of possibilities for anyone that has its hands on this tech to use it – even when tested on people with more normal implants, like cochlear implants, eye implants or pace makers.
Because the brain chips are such a huge research area right now and because so many kinds already are developed, is it important that already today, formulate strategies and directions that might be able to at least diminish some of the consequences of this technology and eliminate abuses. Implanting this technology in the human body without knowledge or consent, must be prohibited.
Soon enough, the technology will be widespread enough to be used in normal medicine in the form of for example nanotechnology or parts of vaccination against viruses of any kind. The human being subjected must be informed and humanity must know what the technology is capable of.
Paradoxically enough, the brain implant technology is getting too little or no attention or ethical debate. At the same time, the potential of this technology to affect human beings and change them is huge. The threat of the implantation technology is in fact greater then genetic changes or enhancements. Genetic changes are very much limited of the human biology. Creating human-machine hybrids doesn’t have the same limitations. A computer connected to a human brain can share information at a distance. The potential for computer-chips implanted into the human brain to change humanity is far greater.
ELLEN M. McGEE and GERALD Q. MAGUIRE (2007). Becoming Borg to Become Immortal: Regulating Brain Implant Technologies. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 16 , pp 291-302 doi:10.1017/S0963180107070326
Synthetic telepathy“Artificial Telepathy” is the art of electronically transfering thought directly to and from a brain. The primary objectives of www.mindcomputers.wordpress.com are to expose technology that can provide point to point communication from one brain to another, to localize unwanted sources of telepathic communication, and to provide evidence that technologically implemented telepathy is possible.
Technology to block unwanted voices is being investigated. A key objective is to prove the existence of criminals who abuse existing synthetic telepathy technology. Further objectives include investigating other computational substrates than brain tissue. www.mindcomputers.wordpress.com is also interested in marketing existing synthetic telepathy technology. For justice and medical purposes only.
Welcome to Mind Computers
The experience of synthetic telepathy or“Artificial Telepathy” is really not that extraordinary. It’s as simple as receiving a cell-phone call in one’s head.
Indeed, most of the technology involved is exactly identical to that of cell-phone technology. Satellites link the sender and the receiver. A computer “multiplexer” routes the voice signal of the sender through microwave towers to a very specifically defined location or cell. The “receiver” is located and tracked with pinpoint accuracy, to within a few feet of actual location. But the receiver is not a cell phone. It’s a human brain.
Out of nowhere, a voice suddenly blooms in the mind of the target. The human skull has no “firewall” and therefore cannot shut the voice out. The receiver can hear the sender’s verbal thoughts. The sender, in turn, can hear all of the target’s thoughts, exactly as if the target’s verbal thoughts had been spoken or broadcast. For this reason, the experience could be called “hearing voices” but is more properly described as “artificial telepathy”.
Now, if artificial telepathy were entirely voluntary, like a conversation between friends sitting across the room from one other, it might be kind of cool. One could talk back and forth with one’s friend, exchanging verbal thoughts exactly as if speaking on the phone, but without ever using one’s voice or mouth. It’s a completely silent, subvocal form of speech. Between lovers, this would be beautiful.
The problem is that artificial telepathy provides the perfect weapon for mental torture and information theft. It provides an extremely powerful means for exploiting, harassing, controlling, and raping the mind of any person on earth. It opens the window to quasi-demonic possession of another person’s soul.
When used as a “nonlethal” weapons system it becomes an ideal means for neutralizing or discrediting a political opponent. Peace protestors, inconvenient journalists and the leaders of vocal opposition groups can be stunned into silence with this weapon.
Artificial telepathy also offers an ideal means for complete invasion of privacy. If all thoughts can be read, then Passwords, PIN numbers, and personal secrets simply cannot be protected. One cannot be alone in the bathroom or shower. Embarrassing private moments cannot be hidden: they are subject to all manner of hurtful comments and remarks. Evidence can be collected for blackmail with tremendous ease: all the wrongs or moral lapses of one’s past are up for review.
Like a perverted phone caller, a hostile person with this technology in hand can call at any time of day, all day long. Sleep can be disrupted. Prayers can be desecrated, religious beliefs mocked. Business meetings can be interrupted, thoughts derailed. Love can be polluted, perverted, twisted, abused. Dreams can be invaded, fond memories trashed.
The attacker cannot be seen or identified, the attack cannot be stopped, and the psychological damage is enormous. But there is no physical damage, not one single mark is left on the body and there is absolutely no proof that any crime or any violation ever took place! Everything that “happens” to the victim happens inside the victim’s head. What physical evidence is there to give the police? Without physical evidence, how can one photograph the “crime scene” or fingerprint the stalker? There are no footprints leading to or from the scene. Indeed, there is no physical scene at all, and no evidence that an attack ever took place.
Most people who experience this abusive form of “artificial telepathy” feel as if their mind has been raped. They find themselves hunted, stalked, harassed and abused by a person or persons who refuse to give their names, who defile one’s mind with the most foul and perverse language imaginable, and who refuse to hang up or go away. The caller or callers delight in the perverse and sadistic torture of their targets. Furthermore, they delight in violating the privacy of their targets, reading the target’s mind and commenting on everything the target thinks, in an effort to demonstrate as brutally as possible that the target has no privacy at all.
Imagine what a man might do if he found a ”cell phone” that allowed him to dial into the heads and the private thoughts of anyone on earth. The temptation to choose a target at random and start spying on or abusing that person would be enormous, almost irresistable. It could become a sick and twisted hobby, a guilty pleasure very quickly. Put into the hands of a secret police unit, the potential for abusing such technology is even more chilling.
Synthetic Telepathy system, would be intelligence gathering and interrogation. As a communication system, it would have a limited appeal as any nation with a similar setup could either listen in, or pretend to be the A.I. interface. As such, it raises important ethical and legal questions, especially the question of secrecy given that all major governments would be aware of the system. Given that no law permits this type of interrogation, its secrecy may be more to do with criminal activity on behalf of the security agencies, rather than national security.
Its All About The Transceiver!
To understand how this works, it is best to start with the target, then trace backwards and identify each of the required subsystems. If we look at the last diagram to the left, we can see that the key to this system is its ability to both listen and respond to the electrical activity of the brain implant from satellite.
Now, the natural reaction of a normal and intelligent person who undergoes the horrible experience of mind rape for the first time is to panic and reach for a real phone. They call family, contact their doctor or call police with a bizarre complaint that “someone is beaming voices into my head.”
But if the police are the ones behind the abuse, the victims aren’t going to get much help, are they? And if the police are not the perpetrators, then how are they to make an arrest? It’s much more convenient and easy to believe that the caller is a nutcase.
In short order, the victim of mind rape finds herself or himself undergoing the additional humiliation of being carted off to the psych ward, often being committed involuntarily by a loved one “for one’s own good.”
The more vehement the efforts to prove that the voice or voices in one’s head are “real”, the more smug become the smiles of the medical doctors, who gently insist that such technology does not exist, that the voices cannot possibly be real, and that one must take a powerful, down for a good long rest.
The experience of “hearing voices” — especially voices that give a running stream of negative abuse — will gain one automatic admission to the rubber room. Indeed, hearing voices is a classic example of schizophrenia. If you hear voices, you are, by definition, crazy.
Yet when released from the psych ward with an expensive supply of meds, “voice hearers” often find that the meds are ineffective — exactly as one would expect if their problem had nothing to do with brain chemistry and everything to do with a bio-electronic attack by unseen stalkers.
Voice hearers often puzzle psychiatrists, because many of them don’t fit the classic model of schizophrenia, which usually begins onset in the early twenties. The victims of Synthetic telepathy “artificial telepathy” are often well into their thirties or fourties and many have no prior history of serious mental illness or drug abuse. Many seem to be alert, healthy, and rational even while insisting that they can hear voices. They agree with the psychiatrists that, yes, they are depressed, but who wouldn’t be a bit depressed under such trying circumstances? To be stalked and verbally bullied every waking hour of the day is a form of mental torture.
Victims of mind rape quickly learn not to discuss their “psychological problems” with family and coworkers. It’s embarrassing, it’s bizarre, it gets very little sympathy and only serves to alarm most people. The only way that another person can “help” is to suggest that the mind rape victim see a psychiatrist, who will promptly double one’s dose of psych meds and antidepressants. The result is a very stiff medical bill, which only adds financial pain to the mix. And the verbal harassment continues.
As they learn to endure their daily torture, voice hearers can usually return to mainstream life, where they are able to carry on intelligent, coherent conversations, hold down jobs, and function quite normally. In fact, if they don’t discuss their “problem” they usually can’t be told apart from normal people on the street. Because they are normal people.
The growing number of voice hearers in our society is therefore well masked. Those who continue to insist that there is a “secret society of people beaming voices into our heads” are simply laughed into silence or labelled paranoid schizophrenics. They are completely discredited. In fact, many voice hearers have internalized the idea that they are mentally ill, and they struggle to understand how their “auditory hallucinations” could continue to seem so very, very real.
Naturally, many of these voice hearers are deeply confused. They turn to support groups, including such on-line communities as the Voice Hearers’ support group at Yahoo.com.
Anyone who doubts that “artificial telepathy” exists need only contact such a Voice Hearers community, where they will encounter people who continue to insist that they are being harassed by real people using an unknown or unexplained technology.
Surprisingly, there is a tremendous amount of scientific literature and circumstantial evidence to back up that claim.
In the following posts, we will explore the history of synthetic telepathy and learn the names of the scientists who developed this sinister technology. We will also identify and examine some of the government agencies that are fielding and using this weapon of torture against innocent civilians.
By Magnus Olsson, Mindtech (Sweden)
Brain “Mind”Link Technology
The NSA – Behind The Curtain
Today we will take an in-depth examination of the NSA’s global intelligence gathering network. What you are about to read will come as an eye-opener and represents the current state of the NSA’s capabilities. Some of this will be expected, some of it will come as a shock.
What you will learn is that the technology that underpins this global listening network is a lot more advanced than governments would have you know. Usually wrapped up in basic, generalised, descriptions the general public is kept blind to the current state of technological development.
We will take this examination in three major parts. The first part will examine the core processing system. Once this part is understood, we can then look at how information flows to and from this core and where it is obtained from. Finally, we will examine how this information is used by the NSA.
I will cover as much as possible about this system, but the scope is very large. In general, any use of this data that the reader can observe is most likely already being conducted.
The scope of the NSA’s infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. Heavily compartmentalised, the entire array of systems is shielded from the average NSA employee as much as it is shielded from the public. That said, once you understand the core of the NSA, you will be in a position to see how information flows in and out of this core.
The NSA is built around a super-computer bound Artificial Intelligence known only as “Mr Computer” in the civilian world. This is not your average A.I., no basic set of responses or a mere dedicated algorithm that can spot patterns. Mr Computer is an entity or being in his own right. A sentient computer s The scope of the NSA’s infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. Heavily compartmentalised, the entire array of systems is shielded from the average NSA employee as much as it is shielded from the public. That said, once you understand the core of the NSA, you will be in a position to see how information flows in and out of this core.
The scope of the NSA’s infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. Heavily compartmentalised, the entire array of systems is shielded from the average NSA employee as much as it is shielded from the public. That said, once you understand the core of the NSA, you will be in a position to see how information flows in and out of this core.
Mr Computer
The NSA is built around a super-computer bound Artificial Intelligence known only as “Mr Computer” in the civilian world. This is not your average A.I., no basic set of responses or a mere dedicated algorithm that can spot patterns. Mr Computer is an entity or being in his own right. A sentient computer system as complex as any human.
Comparable to VMware in a way, an instance of Mr Computer can be started at a moments notice. Within seconds, a fully fledged virtual intelligence agent, ready to analyse the information that has been piped to him, can be up and running.
Mr Computer is competent enough to handle real-time interaction without human intervention. Mr Computer understands and speaks all modern languages and even a number of dead ones. Able to intelligently converse and express its own opinions, Mr Computer collates information from disparate sources and compiles them into concise reports that do not miss the smallest detail or nuance.
Mr Computer’s capabilities and human-like reasoning cannot be understated.
The NSA is a data center to house a 512 qubit quantum computer capable of learning, reproducing the brain’s cognitive functions, and programming itself.
The National Security Center is building a highly fortified $2 Billion highly top secret complex simply named the “Utah Data Center” which will soon be home to the Hydrogen bomb of cybersecurity – A 512 Qubit Quantum Computer — which will revitalize the the “total information awareness” program originally envisioned by George Bush in 2003.
The news of the data center comes after Department of Defense contractor Lockheed Martin secured a contract with D-Wave for $10 million for a 512 qubit Quantum Computer code-named Vesuvius.
Vesuvius is capable of executing a massive number of computations at once, more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is would take millions of years on a standard desktop.
The computer will be able to crack even the most secure encryption and will give the US government a quantum leap into technologies once only dreamed of including the rise of the world’s very first all-knowing omniscient self-teaching artificial intelligence.
The D-Wave Quantum computer boasts of a wide array of features including:
Binary classification – Enables the quantum computer to be fed vast amounts of complex input data, including text, images, and videos and label the material
Quantum Unsupervised Feature Learning QUFL – Enables the computer to learn on its own, as well as create and optimize its own programs to make itself run more efficiently.
Temporal QUFL – Enables the Computer to predict the future based in information it learns through Binary classification and the QUFL feature.
Artificial Intelligence Via Quantum Neural Network – Enables the computer to completely reconstruct the human brain’s cognitive processes and teach itself how to make better decisions and better predict the future based.
D-Wave’s 512-qubit chip, code-named Vesuvius
D-Wave’s 512-qubit chip, code-named Vesuvius. The white square on the right contains the quantum goodness. Photo: D-Wave
Via Wired:
D-Wave Defies World of Critics With ‘First Quantum Cloud’
The quantum computer is the holy grail of tech research. The idea is to build a machine that uses the mind-bending properties of very small particles to perform calculations that are well beyond the capabilities of machines here in the world of classical physics. But it’s still not completely clear that a true quantum computer can actually be built.
[...]
But Rose keeps fighting. In May, D-Wave published a paper in the influential journal Nature that backed up at least some of its claims. And more importantly, it landed a customer. That same month, mega defense contractor Lockheed Martin bought a D-Wave quantum computer and a support contract for $10 million.
The critics have been so vociferous in large part because Rose isn’t shy about promoting his company. But that’s just the way he is. Rose likens D-Wave’s quantum computers to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator. “They’re the largest programmable quantum systems that have ever been built by a long shot,” he says. And his latest pitch is that D-Wave is on verge of unveiling the world’s first quantum cloud. That’s right, quantum-computing-as-a-service.
[...]
D-Wave’s computer is designed to solve what are called combinatorial optimization problems. The classic example is figuring out the most efficient route for a traveling salesman going to multiple destinations. There’s no mathematical shortcut that computers can take to solve combinatorial optimization problems. They have to use brute force: Simply check all possible combinations. The trouble is, the number of possibilities explodes exponentially with the problem size. For example, if you have six destinations, there are 64 possible combinations. If you have 20 destinations, there are 1,048,576 possible combinations.
D-Wave’s next-generation computer is designed to handle problems with as many as 512 variables. In theory, that lets you solve problems involving two to the 512 possible combinations, and a problem of that size is beyond the reach of any classical computer that could ever be built. “It’s bigger than the number of atoms in the universe,” Rose says. “It doesn’t matter how big a supercomputer you make.”
[...]
He then convinced Lockheed Martin’s management to buy a D-Wave computer and install it in a lab at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Lockheed Martin and USC split time on the machine, and Lockheed Martin’s access is via a secure network. The machine came online at noon on December 23, and the company now has 50 people working on it.
OK, so quantum computing may sound all very theoretical (and indeed at present a lot of it actually is!). However, practical quantum computing research is now very much under way. Perhaps most notably, back in 2007 a Canadian company called D-Wave announced what it described as “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer”. This was based on a 16 qubit processor — the Rainer R4.7 — made from the rare metal niobium supercooled into a superconducting state. Back in 2007, D-Wave demonstrated their quantum computer performing several tasks including playing Sudoku and creating a complex seating plan.
Many people at the time were somewhat sceptical of D-Wave’s claims. However, in December 2009, Google revealed that it had been working with D-Wave to develop quantum computing algorithms for image recognition purposes. Experiments had included using a D-Wave quantum computer to recognise cars in photographs faster than possible using any conventional computer in a Google data centre. Around this time, there was also an announcement from IBM that it was rededicating resources to quantum computing research in the “hope that a five-year push [would] produce tangible and profound improvements”.
In 2011, D-Wave launched a fully-commercial, 128-qubit quantum computer. Called the D-Wave One, this is described by the company as a “high performance computing system designed for industrial problems encountered by fortune 500 companies, government and academia”. The D-Wave One‘s super-cooled 128 qubit processor is housed inside a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter shielded room. Just look at the picture here and you will see the sheer size of the thing relative to a human being. At launch, the D-Wave One cost $10 million. The first D-Wave One was sold to US aerospace, security and military giant Lockheed Martin in May 2011.
D-Wave aside, other research teams are also making startling quantum computing advances. For example, in September 2010, the Centre for Quantum Photonics in Bristol in the United Kingdom reported that it had created a new photonic quantum chip. This is able to operate at normal temperatures and pressures, rather than under the extreme conditions required by the D-Wave One and most other quantum computing hardware. According to the guy in charge — Jeremy O’Brien — his team’s new chip may be used as the basis of a quantum computer capable of outperforming a conventional computer “within five years”.
Another significant quantum computing milestone was reported in January 2011 by a team from Oxford University. Here strong magnetic fields and low temperatures were used to link — or “quantumly entangle” — the electrons and nuclei of a great many phosphorous atoms inside a highly purified silicon crystal. Each entangled electron and nucleus was then able to function as a qubit. Most startlingly, ten billion quantumly entangled qubits were created simultaneously. If a way an be found to link these together, the foundation will have been laid for an incredibly powerful computing machine. In comparison to the 128 qubit D-Wave One, a future computer with even a fraction of a 10 billion qubit capacity could clearly possess a quite literally incomprehensible level of processing power.
Details About The NSA Quantum Computer Spy Center
The National Security Center’s massive $2 Billion Dollar highly fortified top secret data center
Watch: Quantum Computers – The Hydrogen Bomb of Cyber Warfare
Watch: Inside The 128 Bit Quantum Computer
Here is a recap of the work the NSA is doing followed by recent technology breakthroughs in quantum physics and detailed overview of what quantum computing.
Well, it has been the $64,000 question for a couple of decades: Can NSA break something like PGP?
While there might be other black world technologies that could be up to the task (there’s no way to know), what we do know is that a practical quantum computing capability would be, for all intents and purposes, the master key.
I’m pretty confident that NSA has this capability and here’s why: IBM Breakthrough May Make Practical Quantum Computer 15 Years Away Instead of 50. There is no hard constant that one can point to when considering how much more advanced black world technologies are than what we think of as state of the art, but if IBM is 15 years away from building a useful quantum computer, it’s not a stretch to assume NSA has that capability already, or is close to having it.
Bamford lays out a narrative below about the “enormous breakthrough,” but, at the end of the day, it’s conventional computers. There’s no mention quantum computers, or even the far less “out there” photonic systems.
Is Bamford’s piece a limited hangout?
Maybe, but it makes for interesting reading in any event.
Note: For some reason, Bamford refers to Mark Klein as, “A whistle-blower,” without naming him. Because of Mark Klein, we know, for sure, that the mass intercepts are happening, how NSA is doing it, the equipment involved, etc. So, thanks, Mark Klein. Heroes have names on Cryptogon.
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
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In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
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The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”
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According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.
The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.
The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)
After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.
Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.
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Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.
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Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.
The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
Cyrptome further quotes the 4 paged wired article.
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
By James Bamford
March 15, 2012
[Excerpts of excellent NSA overview to focus on the MRF decryption facility.]
When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.
Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.
There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.
The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the “secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.
In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.
Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the ex-NSA computer expert.
At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.
1 Geostationary satellites
Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.
2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.
4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio
Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.
5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.
6 Domestic listening posts
The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.
7 Overseas listening posts
According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.
8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah
At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.
9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.
10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer here.
Overview of Camp Williams site before the construction works began. UDC will be located on the west side of the highway, on what was previously an airfield (Image from http://www.publicintelligence.net)
The biggest-ever data complex, to be completed in Utah in 2013, may take American citizens into a completely new reality where their emails, phone calls, online shopping lists and virtually entire lives will be stored and reviewed.
US government agencies are growing less patient with their own country with every month. First, paying with cash, shielding your laptop screen and a whole list of other commonplace habits was proclaimed to be suspicious – and if you see something you are prompted to say something. Then, reports emerged that drones are being fetched for police forces. Now, the state of Utah seems to be making way in a bid to host the largest-ever cyber shield in the history of American intelligence. Or is it a cyber-pool?
Utah sprang to media attention when the Camp Williams military base near the town of Bluffdale sprouted a vast, 240-acre construction site. American outlets say that what’s hiding under the modest plate of a Utah Data Complex is a prospective intelligence facility ordered by the National Security Agency.
Cyber-security vs. Total awareness
The NSA maintains that the data center, to be completed by September 2013, is a component of the Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative. The facility is to provide technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security, collect intelligence on cyber threats and carry out cyber-security objectives, reported Reuters.
But both ordinary Americans and their intelligence community were quick to dub it “a spy center.”
The Utah Data Center will be built on a 240-acre site near Camp Williams, Utah. Once completed in September 2013, it will be twice as large as the US Capitol. The center will provide 100,000 square feet of computer space, out of a total one million square feet. The project, launched in 2010, is to cost the National Security Agency up to $2 billion
The highly-classified project will be responsible for intercepting, storing and analyzing intelligence data as it zips through both domestic and international networks. The data may come in all forms: private e-mails, cell phone calls, Google searches – even parking lot tickets or shop purchases.
“This is more than just a data center,” an official source close to the project told the online magazine Wired.com. The source says the center will actually focus on deciphering the accumulated data, essentially code-breaking.
This means not only exposing Facebook activities or Wikipedia requests, but compromising “the invisible” Internet, or the “deepnet.” Legal and business deals, financial transactions, password-protected files and inter-governmental communications will all become vulnerable.
Once communication data is stored, a process known as data-mining will begin. Everything a person does – from traveling to buying groceries – is to be displayed on a graph, allowing the NSA to paint a detailed picture of any given individual’s life.
With this in mind, the agency now indeed looks to be “the most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever,” as Wired.com puts it.
William Binney, NSA’s former senior mathematician-gone-whistleblower, holds his thumb and forefinger close together and tells the on-line magazine:
“We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
‘Everybody is a target’
Before the data can be stored it has to be collected. This task is already a matter of the past, as the NSA created a net of secret monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities – a practice that was exposed by people like William Binney in 2006.
The program allowed the monitoring of millions of American phone calls and emails every day. In 2008, the Congress granted almost impecible legal immunity to telecom companies cooperating with the government on national security issues.
By this time, the NSA network has long outgrown a single room in the AT&T building in San Francisco, says Binney:
“I think there are ten to twenty of them. This is not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”
Binney suspects the new center in Utah will simply collect all the data there is to be collected. Virtually, no one can escape the new surveillance, created in the US for the War on Terror.
Some data, of course, would be crucial in the anti-terrorism battle: exposing potential adversaries. The question is how the NSA defines who is and who is not a potential adversary.
“Everybody is a target; everybody with communication is a target,” remarks another source close to the Utah project.
Breaking the unbreakable
Now, the last hurdle in the NSA’s path seems to be the Advanced Encryption Standard cipher algorithm, which guards financial transactions, corporate mail, business deals, and diplomatic exchanges globally. It is so effective that the National Security Agency even recommended it for the US government.
Here, the Utah data complex may come in handy for two reasons. First: what cannot be broken today can be stored for tomorrow. Second: a system to break the AES should consist of a super-fast computer coupled with a vast storage capabilities to save as many instances for analysis as possible.
The data storage in Utah, with its 1 million square feet of enclosed space, is virtually bottomless, given that a terabyte can now be stored on a tiny flash drive. Wired.com argues that the US plan to break the AES is the sole reason behind the construction of the Utah Data Center.
The eavesdropping issue has been rocking the US since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, when domestic spying was eventually outlawed. Nowadays, a lot of questions are still being asked about the secret activities of the US government and whether it could be using the Patriot Act and other national security legislation to justify potentially illegal actions. The NSA’s former employees, who decided to go public, wonder whether the agency – which is to spend up to $2 billion on the heavily fortified facility in Utah – will be able to restrict itself to eavesdropping only on international communications.
Californian biologist Andrew Hessel says, ‘Cells are living computers and DNA is a programming language,’ but warns that this could lead to viruses and bacteria used to ‘hack’ human minds
The field of ‘synthetic biology’ is in its infancy. We can ‘tweak’ the genetics of life forms – but billionaire entrepreneur Craig Venter only created ‘artificial life’ for the first time last year, christening his life form ‘Synthia’.
But experts working within the field believe that our expertise is out-accelerating natural evolution by a factor of millions of years – and some warn that synthetic biology could spin out of control.
It could lead, says Andrew Hessel of Singularity University, on Nasa’s research campus, to a world where hackers could engineer viruses or bacteria to control human minds.
Hessel believes that genetic engineering is the next frontier of computing.
‘This is one of the most powerful technologies in the world,’ says Hessel ‘Synthetic biology – the writing of life.’
‘I advocate that cells are living computers and DNA is a programming language.’
‘I want to see life programmed and used to solve global challenges so that humanity can achieve a sustainable relationship within the biosphere,’ he says.It’s growing fast. It will grow faster than computer technologies.’
He predicts a world where we can ‘print’ DNA, and even ‘decode’ it. But he warned, in a speech at technology conference TXM, that viruses and bacteria send chemicals into human brains – and could be used to influence, or even ‘control’ their host.
A literal virus – injected into a ‘host’ in the guise of a vaccine, say – could be used to control behaviour.
Hessel warns that we ‘may have to learn how to counterattack’ against such weapons.
Viruses and bacteria have a chemical relationship with their human hosts – feeding us chemicals. An engineered virus could, in theory, feed us chemicals that influence our behaviour, warns Hessel
‘Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early Eighties, Few initially recognised the problem – but it grew exponentially,’ says security expert Marc Goodman
Security expert Marc Goodman said, ‘Synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism,’ and said, ‘Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early Eighties, Few initially recognised the problem – but it grew exponentially.’
When billionaire entrepreneur Craig Venter ‘created life’ last year by adding synthetic DNA to a bacteria cell, Professor Julian Savulescu, an Oxford University ethicist, said: ‘Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny.This could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm.’
Hessel, however, is generally optimistic about the future of synthetic biology.
The scientist – who had a vasectomy because he ‘never trusted the process’ of natural reproduction, says, ‘We are going to make synthetic genomes – human genomes. It will make cloning look organic. It will make human reproduction look quaint.’
Computer World blogger Darlene Storm says, ‘I know people who can’t even keep their computers protected, updated and patched – I wonder if they would be more security minded when the hacking could be lethal?’
Computers that read minds are being developed by Intel
New technology could allow people to dictate letters and search the internet simply by thinking, according to researchers at Intel who are behind the project.
Computers that can read minds are being developed by Intel. Photo: ALAMY
Unlike current brain-controlled computers, which require users to imagine making physical movements to control a cursor on a screen, the new technology will be capable of directly interpreting words as they are thought.
Intel’s scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words which can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking.
Preliminary tests of the system have shown that the computer can work out words by looking at similar brain patterns and looking for key differences that suggest what the word might be.
Dean Pomerleau, a senior researcher at Intel Laboratories, said that currently, the devices required to get sufficient detail of brain activity were bulky, expensive magnetic resonance scanners, like those used in hospitals.
But he said work was under way to produce smaller pieces of equipment that can be worn as headsets and that can produce the same level of detail.
He said: “The computer uses a form of 20 questions to narrow down what the word is.
“So a noun with a physical property such as spade, which you dig with, produces activity in the motor cortex of the brain, as this is the area that controls physical movements.
“A food related word like apple, however, produces activity in those parts of the brain related to hunger. So the computer can infer attributes to each word being thought about and this lets the computer zero down on what the word is pretty quickly.
“We are currently mapping out the activity that an average brain produces when thinking about different words. It means you’ll be able to write letters, open emails or do Google searches just by thinking”.
Intel already have a working prototype that can detect words such as “screwdriver”, “house” and “barn”, by measuring around 20,000 points in the brain.
But as brain scanning technology becomes more sophisticated the computer’s ability to distinguish thoughts will improve.
Justin Ratner, director of Intel Laboratories and the company’s chief technology officer, said: “Mind reading is the ultimate user interface. There will be concerns about privacy with this sort of thing and we will have to overcome them.
“What is clear though is that humans are not restricted any more to just using keyboards and mice”.
There could be conflict between the personal freedom to use one‘s economic resources to get an implant that will enhance one‘s physical capabilities and what society at large considers desirable or ethically acceptable.“
Think your thoughts are private?
Ever told a lie and been caught red-handed? Using brain-scanning by implants technology scientists are beginning to probe our minds and tell if we’re lying. Other scientists are decoding our desires and exploring the difference between our conscious and unconscious mind. But can you really trust the technology?
How threatening for mankind is an Artificial Brain ?
First let me state that at this moment the biggest threat for mankind is the human specie ! ABC-weapons in wrong hands can result in extreme damaging behavior.
25-04-2010. MINDTECH seeks to establish a network of laymen and media. This group will be dealing with the social and ethical sides to research, development and the implementation of emerging technologies in our society.
Meanwhile, philosophers working alongside the researchers say it’s time to find out more about how the public feels about such bionic research, which in some cases is being used to enhance human memory, physical abilities and perception.“
Not yet published research materials in interdisciplinary brain research and development of computer-brain interface must therefore be attributed to an unknown number of defenseless experimental subjects, many with families whose lives are destroyed in a wild orgy of computer abuse.This is to copy the cognitive behaviors and human perception in the development of quantum physics.Try The items have no options or informed consent, served as on-line research materials on aging.
MindUploading.org addresses the specific issues that may arise when neural prostheses are customized to a specific patient, and when large scale neural prostheses lead to whole brain emulation: the emulation of a patient’s complete brain function in a prosthetic substrate. Site content is focused on neuroscience and computational research that is involved in an eventual progression from neural prostheses to the applied science of whole brain emulation, including the concept of “mind-transfer”.
The natural conclusion is that the perpetrators have something to gain by doing this to us. We are victims of experimentation done on humans without consent. Two areas of research are Artificial Intelligence and Non-Lethal Weapons.
It is inevitable. In the near future, someone will decide to record every moment of a human life from birth to death in digital storage. This will be more than an extreme reality TV stunt. It will mark the era of personal memory offloading, an adaptive memory technology that records and indexes every single moment of your life. Offloading personal memory begins with a personal memory device, or a PMD. The basic PMD would be no more complex than a nano chip implant in the brain that captures your every experience. A PMD could be easily fitted shortly after birth; the least invasive option would be like a Bluetooth headset worn over the ear connected wirelessly to a local device no larger than a cell phone. Once installed, the PMD would capture and upload all first-person memories to a centralized database for indexing, search, and recall.
Would the PMD remember where you parked? Always. Will it warn you when you are about to walk away and leave your hat and sunglasses on the bench behind you? Totally. Will it send you birthday reminders, schedule your meetings, remind you to pick up your dry-cleaning and let you program your DVR with voice commands? Yes. Will it find your car keys and remote control for you? Maybe. Will it record your innermost thoughts? Probably not. It won’t always be perfect, but it will greatly extend your normal range of memory, and over time it will become like an indispensable part of your brain.
External data is easy to record and index, but internal memory such as feelings, thoughts, ideas, and dreams present some engineering challenges. The PMD could be fitted with an invasive brain implant to extend functionality, but to keep things simple, let’s consider some cheap, non-invasive solutions. Biometric data such as temperature, galvanic skin response, brainwave activity, pulse, respiration rates, and perspiration levels can monitor mood, arousal, activity levels, and so on. This biometric data, no matter how spotty, can be used to generate a dynamic emotional profile for any individual as they move through their day. Speech and behavioral analysis can also track levels of focus and activity to indicate mood and engagement in reality. Facial gestures and voice pitch can be tracked to sense subtle emotional reactions to stimulus. There could be a service that monitors your diet and daily routines to see if you are acting in healthy or unhealthy ways. If environmental data capture is complete, filling in emotional data from biometric analysis would be a simple software task.
With your PMD you would be able to say, “Remember the time I did (activity) with (person) at (location)?” and your PMD would search your memory database and stream the audio, video, and emotional rendering of the experience to your cell phone. Or you could ask, “Remember that book I read on chimpanzees? Who was the author?” Multiple memories may fit your query and be returned as a basic search list with text, video, and audio links. Similar memories with substituted variables might be offered up as tangents. Your request may provide you with “links” to other activities at that same location or to other books you have read by the same author. Beyond that, you could watch yourself relive important memories, or if friends and family members had similar devices, you could share personal events and watch group memories through multiple perspectives. Human memory integrity need no longer rely on lossy neural compression and the unreliable he-said/she-said narratives that compose written history. It would all be a matter of public record stored in time-stamped relational database tables for all of history. At the very least, it may save a few arguments between married couples.
The PMD sounds like science fiction, but the technology for creating it exists today. It could be an iPhone app. The engineering hurdles would be the physical disk space and CPU cycles needed for daily storage, compression, and indexing of video and audio data for every person with a PMD. Let’s assume storage and CPU cycles are solvable problems and that indexing and compression of video and speech data will only get better and faster over time. So pretty soon, for a moderate monthly fee, you could get a PMD system bundled with your cable, cell-phone, or internet bill. With a pocket or desktop unit, your daily memory will be locally stored and indexed. The relevant data points would then be uploaded to a central server for global storage and cross-indexing with other personal memories and digital records over the course of your lifetime. Like a Tivo, your PMD would be able to predict which memories you want to save, which memories your friends and family will like, and which memories are private, redundant, or expendable. It would be easy to customize these features for each individual, making indexing personal memory an intuitive task that would involve automatically setting user preferences based on daily routines; mirroring actual learning and memory networking in the brain.
From cosmetics to cars, many products we use on a daily basis already utilise nanotechnology – but are you aware of the implications? Penny Sarchet and David Adam explain all you need to know
Nanotechnology is technology that operates on the nanoscale, about one billionth of a metre. If a living cell were a large city, then a nanometre would be about the size of a car. Nanotechnology is the art of engineering down at this hard-to-fathom scale.
The idea started in 1959 when famous physicist Richard Feynman suggested we could manipulate individual atoms and use them to build tiny machines. However, the term “nanotechnology” was not coined until the 1980s and lumps together different and varied ideas.
All that unites these different technologies is that they use nano-sized building blocks. While other technologies make machines out of bulk materials – microchips out of silicon, wires out of copper, cars out of steel – nanotechnology makes machines out of large, complex molecules. Because nanotechnology works at such an extreme and unexplored scale, it opens up a world of new possibilities. Many nanomaterials possess special properties, such as great strength or high ability to conduct electricity.
Scientists working in the field of nanotechnology often look to nature to provide ideas for “smart” ways to solve complex problems. For example, spider silk and lotus leaves have both been studied in order to replicate their special properties, ie their tensile strength or ability to repel water, in engineered materials.
Why should I care about nanotechnology?
Nanotechnology is not just one technology, it is a whole new toolkit. It has the potential to change almost everything, from unimaginably small computer chips to tiny machines that find and fix damaged arteries inside our bodies. Nanotechnology could make our energy cleaner, our lives longer, and all of our existing technologies better.
This is not just a distant, science fiction-like dream – nanomaterials are already present in more than 1,000 consumer products, from cosmetics to cars. However, because nanotechnology works on such a new scale, it can be difficult to assess its dangers.
Everyday examples
Nanotechnology is a powerful tool for answering some of our most difficult questions. Scientists say we cannot afford to ignore the new medical, agricultural and environmental technologies it could provide as we search for solutions to an expanding global population.
Potential risks
Consumers will face different risks than the workers who manufacture these products, as they are the ones exposed to high doses. Various agencies are involved in making sure protection measures are adequate for both groups.
Where is nanotechnology used?
Nanotechnology is used in every sector you can think of, from the cars we drive to the clothes we wear.
It is easy to see why ultra-lightweight materials with special electrical properties are useful, in electronics and computing for example, but nanomaterials are also present in scratch-resistant car bumpers, self-cleaning glass and anti-odour socks. Nanotech materials are being added to health and fitness products, from anti-ageing creams to skis.
Silver is a powerful anti-microbial agent and more than 300 products use nanoscale silver to make anti-bacterial surfaces, clothing and even condoms.
Nanotechnology can also address environmental concerns. Nanotech catalytic converters and water filters remove environmental pollutants from our exhaust fumes and waste water. Wind turbines with nanomaterials are more efficient and cheaper, nanocrystal solar panels are just around the corner. Nanotechnology is already providing fresh solutions wherever it is applied.
Everyday example
The first use of nanomedicine was approved back in 1995 to treat cancer; since then researchers have continued to find new ways for nanotechnology to combat diseases.
Potential risks
Nanosilver, if over-used in consumer products that have a short lifespan, might cause harm to the environment.
How could it be used in the future?
Today, many of our products are improved by nanomaterials. In the future, however, nanotechnology aims to use these nanomaterials to construct tiny nano-engineered machines, computers and medicines.
In energy research, we may see a shift from using nanomaterials to improve existing technologies to using nanotechnology to develop entirely new ways of harnessing energy and, in the future, cars might be powered cleanly by hydrogen, stored safely in a solid form thanks to nanotechnology.
One day, nanotechnology may allow us to build any kind of structure we want from atomic building blocks to construct powerful computers, capable of processing as much information as a DNA molecule.
Everyday example
Researchers are already developing nanomedicines that target the proteins that accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, and nanoparticles that bind to tumour cells and treat them with antibodies. The big step will be using them to treat human diseases.
Potential risks
As with the adoption of all technologies, it is important to understand the motivation for doing so (eg money, public benefit) and its impacts, particularly risks.
Should nanoproducts be labelled?
In November 2009, the European Union passed a law that will soon force manufacturers of cosmetics to state on the label if their products contain nanoparticles.
Will more products follow? The issue of labelling has divided campaigners and politicians, just as it has with whether foods should be labelled as containing genetically modified ingredients.
Supporters of labels on nanotech say they will encourage consumer choice. Opponents say they will be meaningless without extra information on whether the nano-ingredients pose any risk. Without context, such labels could be misinterpreted as warnings, they say.
Everyday examples
Lipsticks and face creams that contain nanoparticles will soon be labelled as such. Perhaps “nano-free” could then start to appear on products too?
Potential risks
Labels might be a shortcut for industry to appear “transparent” without really informing the public.
Is the use of nanomaterials in food safe?
The food industry has been slow to exploit nanotechnology, perhaps because of public attitudes towards “non-natural” foods. But there are numerous ways the technology could be used, from stronger plastic films to keep sandwiches fresh for longer, to adding flavours to foods.
In most cases, the development of such techniques has proceeded faster than the safety checks that are needed to make sure they are safe – could nanoparticles escape from plastic wrapping to enter a ham baguette? Would that packaging need to be disposed of differently and could it be recycled?
The European Food Standards Authority is keeping a close watch on developments.
Everyday examples
Nanoparticles could indicate the presence of harmful bacteria in foods.
Potential risks
The safety of nanomaterials used in food and food packaging must be fully assessed to avoid unwanted side effects.
What is the real added value of nanotech?
Nanotechnology is such a broad term that it is difficult to generalise about the value it could bring.
There will be clear social value, in the form of cleaner energy and improved medicines; and individual value in that nanotechnology used in sporting equipment, for example, would improve an individual’s performance. On the other hand, having hundreds of products that are anti-bacterial most likely will not bring many additional benefits to society.
Value, to a certain extent, is in the eye of the user of the technology. A patient who can benefit from one type of tiny particle injected into their bloodstream to test for heart disease and so avoid surgery, for example, would probably see more added value than an average tennis player who started playing with a racket made and improved by using nanomaterials. A mis-hit still goes into the net after all, nanotech racket or not.
Everyday examples
Nanotechnology is being used as a marketing tag to sell everything from socks and t-shirts to sports equipment. The true benefit comes from the way it is used by the consumer.
Do nanoproducts require special disposal?
One of the concerns over the widespread use of nanotechnology is that tiny particles could escape from where they are intended to be used and end up polluting the wider environment.
This is not a problem confined to nanotechnology of course, and a number of chemicals that we know to be toxic are used in everyday products such as light bulbs and batteries. Consumers are asked to dispose of these products carefully, but there is no way to be sure that they will do so. And some escapes are impossible to prevent – for example, much of the mercury in the atmosphere comes from the cremation of dead people with dental fillings.
The effects of nanoparticles on the wider environment are largely unknown, so perhaps a cautious approach is the best one?
Everyday examples
Factories and research laboratories could release nanoparticles in their waste streams. Many international bodies are looking at ways in which accidental release of nanoparticles can be monitored and prevented.
Potential risks
Toxic particles could pollute the natural environment and kill wildlife.
The National Security Center’s massive $2 Billion Dollar highly fortified top secret data center![[Image]](http://cryptome.org/2012-info/nsa-mrf/pict17.jpg)
