nano-snoops

nano silicon wire wrapped around a hair


"Even such nominally altruistic sciences as medicine and plant-breeding have now become so deeply interpenetrated with economics and politics that their motives are at best mixed with, and at worst replaced by, the motives of corporations and governments. To reduce life to the scope of our understanding, is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale." Wendell Berry from here


Biosensors, bioelectronics and food here

Specifically, one of the primary privacy risks related to nanotechnology is the potential to implant microchips into humans. Researchers acknowledge that nanotech microchips could provide a great deal of added benefits, such as dispensing customized amounts of drugs, or alternatively aiding Alzheimer's patients through an implanted "assisted cognition" device to ensure these patients do not get lost.[87] These goals are laudable, but must be accompanied by the consideration that many technologies tend to "creep" into other areas. here


Little Brother's watching you - The future of surveillance is small, very small by Jim Thomas from The Ecologist

Invisible control is power. The founding editor of Wired magazine once suggested that the more significant a technology is, the less able we are to recognise it as a technology at all. Technologies such as writing and clocks long ago ceased to be noticed as technologies yet continued to be used by those in power to extend control. Today nanotechnology, and microscale technology, already operating in the realm of the near invisible, offer a new platform to do the same. We may be some way away from the molecular surveillance cameras that thicken the air of sci-fi dystopias, but as the fledgling nanotech industry emerges alongside the 'war on terrorism', a trajectory towards a nano surveillance society is coming worryingly into focus. More