20:02:2013 -- INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES ARE USING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA TO SPY ON YOU‏

Dear Friends,

Imagine my surprise...

Be Well.

David

INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES ARE USING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA TO SPY ON YOU

By Sam Clements

Do you ever worry that the government doesn't know quite enough about what you do and where you do it? I know I do, which is why I was excited to hear about the great work being done by Raytheon. They're one of the planet's largest defence firms whose bread and butter is weapons of mass annihilation (like Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles) that regularly rain death and destruction down upon foreign countries. And now they're looking at you.

You see the good men and women at Raytheon have been secretly developing a computer programme called "Riot". Sounds cool I know, but actually it stands for Rapid Information Overlay Technology, and it's basically a sophisticated piece of surveillance equipment. The Guardian described it as "Google for spies" and your government are reportedly very interested in it. 

Riot is a piece of software that has been developed with help from the US government. It collates social media "check-ins" to dot your movements over Google Maps, and collates your social networking activity to see both who you're friends with, and what you all like to spend your time doing. Add all that shit together and you basically have an algorithm for predicting your behaviour. It's basically like that episode of Black Mirrorwhere a dead man's personality can be replicated from the traces of himself he left behind on social media, but y'know, less Charlie Brooker and more Joe McCarthy.

If this worries you, it's probs best not to think about the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK.

A Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missile.

Remember The Stasi

Duncan Mee is an old friend of VICE, a private eye who spends his days hunting down runaways for a private investigation firm called Cerberus. According to him, digital surveillance is the new secret police, and just as stop and search powers are used to criminalise particular groups, Riot surveillance will be used to target certain types of people.

“The Stasi [the East German secret police] had everybody in their pocket," Duncan tells me over the phone from his office in Covent Garden. "You knew that somebody, certainly in your extended family, was unwillingly in the pocket of a massive machine that was collecting data on everyone. And now that same level of data is there, just without the legwork.

“There will be a time where it becomes a bit like stop and search. You get stopped and searched if you fit the profile – if you happen to be black or you happen to be driving a clapped-out banger. It’s a target-rich environment for the police; they know they’re more likely to get a result if they make those approaches, and it must be tempting, armed with these types of tools, to start looking.”

According to Duncan, the police already watch football fans with advanced surveillance technology, even though the tech is only supposed to be used against suspected terrorists. So, just as the drones have moved from American foreign policy into the domestic sphere, techniques once reserved for the most serious of threats are now being utilised in the fight against bald men throwing coins at one another in pub carparks. 

Riot placing a target’s movements on Google Maps, ready for analysis.

You Can't Opt Out

On its own, Riot will only have extensively-detailed information on people who insist on narrating their lives through social media – here's looking at you, Sophie Heawood – but that won't always be the case. Frank Ahearn – an ex-private detective and the author of very spy-y sounding books like The Digital Hit Man and How to Disappear – believes Riot is just starting. In his opinion, it could potentially be linked to every other database currently containing information about us, creating an over-arching state surveillance system. Which will be fantastic news for totalitarians.  

“I take it you’re not familiar with the software TIA (Total Information Awareness) that the United States was working on several years ago?" Ahearn asks me over the phone. Surprisingly, I say, I'm not. "Well," he continues, "it basically takes information from every company out there that keeps databases on their customers. It was supposed to create this huge network of profiles on every single American."

TIA was officially canned in 2003 because everyone thought that being spied on really sucked, but many people believe that TIA was just renamed and that the project still unofficially exists. In fact, Riot’s social media analytics could be the final piece of the complete database of American citizens that the Bush administration dreamt of in-between invading countries and rounds of golf.

Ahearn seems to agree: "The question about this Riot software is: What else are they doing? Are they matching it with public records? Are they matching it with utility information? The problem I can see is if they can match your online presence to your offline presence.”

For all the protestations against invasion of privacy though, a quick glance through your Facebook friends should be enough to prove that few people seem to give a shit about their own online privacy. But, according to Frank, we all will once we realise we can't delete any of the private stuff we've posted, and that other countries have started buying up all our secrets. 

“When you hit enter on a computer, there’s a digital trace that never goes away. Point blank, that’s the bottom line. You may delete a Facebook account, but it doesn’t mean they delete it. They keep it in their database and, five years from now, their terms of service might change or they get bought by China and they’ll say, 'Screw this – we’re putting it all up now whether you deleted it or not.' That’s what people aren’t taking into consideration. It’s like a tattoo: you can’t always remove it.”

Riot search results yield images with embedded longitude and latitude data, pinpointed on Google Maps.

An Experiment in Riot 

Talking to these guys and reading about Riot, I began to wonder just how much I've shared on my own Facebook page. So, with an overinflated sense of my Excel abilities and some patchy Facebook analysis, I produced my own DIY Riot software to track and investigate myself – it's like 2.0 self-reflection, or something.   

It all starts on the Facebook information bar at the top of your profile page. Here you can access the Map feature, which shows each place you’ve checked-in at. 

If you check-in a lot, your map will be a lavish, all-you-can-eat banquet for stalkers. I don't check in that much, which is lucky not just because I'm giving less information to the company (and subsequently Riot/Raytheon), but also because I was collecting all this data manually and it would have taken me ages if I checked-in everywhere I go. Riot, of course, does all that automatically and instantly compares dates, time and the number of check-ins at certain places.

Using the semi-professional Excel skills I picked up in year nine IT class, I made a load of pie and bar charts – a bit like Riot does – by tallying up the places I’ve checked-in at most. The analysis? My life is a masochistic blend of alcohol abuse and exercise. If some sinister busybody wanted to track me down, presumably either to take me out for a drink or admire my massive pecs, the data suggests they should start looking at my local gym or pub. Which isn't exactly that revelatory.

However, it starts to get a little more menacing when you realise that the data can decipher which days you're most likely to be at a check-in spot. For example, despite the fact I have zero-to-little body muscle to show for it, Facebook tells me the one location I go to the most is the gym, and the days I'm there most often are Tuesday and Saturday. Not Monday, though. You can't go to the gym on a Monday; it makes you want to kill yourself.

By manually taking the timestamp from each Facebook check-in (something Riot can do automatically, of course), I also compiled a graph of the most frequent hours I go to the gym. Typically I happen to be there any time between 7PM and 9PM. So, if you ever wanted to locate me on CCTV or in person to track my movements for the rest of the day, or to steal something I have in my possession, your best bet would be to start at the gym on a Tuesday evening. Which actually scares me less than it worries me about how lame and predictable my life is. Of course, if I were an important political figure and not a hipster gym freak, this information would be more valuable.

Bear in mind that this study was performed using the most rudimentary technology known to man: man. Riot has the capability to collate that information instantly and seamlessly link it to any other online information that it can gather. I don't think I'm currently planning on committing any major crimes, or am of specific interest to any one person who might want to track me down, but the thought that someone could if they wanted to (and the simple fact that the information is there at all) kind of creeps me out. Clearly, I'm not going to geo-tag myself any more; that should sort it out. Oh wait, what's that? Other people can tag you? Shiiiiiiiit.

Follow Sam on Twitter: @sambobclements

19:02:2013 -- Five Real Computer Systems That Could Become Skynet

Dear Friends, Oh my... http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/263366/five-real-computer-systems-that-could-become-skynet/1  Be Well. David Five Real Computer Systems That Could Become Skynet By Peter Pachal April 19, 2011 14 Comments Google 3 Share 414 Tweet 109 Submit 10 Share 33 Pin It 0 Email IBM Watson In case you haven't checked the Internet in months, Watson is the supercomputer who beat two veteran Jeopardy champions at their own game earlier this month. Engineered by IBM, Watson is capable of processing 500 gigabytes per second, comprises 90 servers, and takes up a massive room at IBM's headquarters in upstate New York. Most important, Watson is excellent at analyzing human language and interpreting what it means. It was designed to learn from its successes and failures, refining its choices the more it made them. The whole idea of Watson is to provide quick, direct answers to complicated questions. Though it's a learning computer and obviously has massive computational abilities, it doesn't have access to any government networks, at least not yet. IBM plans to unleash Watson's abilities to help doctor's and patients make better choices. It's not hard to imagine a military Watson, programmed to help generals make big strategic decisions. And if it were to conclude that humans are making the wrong ones… Next: DARPA's GILA system Back to Article 1 / 5

18:02:2013 -- Mini Solar System Entering Our's

Dear Friends,

U Never know...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7epUEacd8uw&feature=share&list=FLJH4HGo2tE8LjYPHIz7KSig

Be Well.

David

18.02:2013 - tHE bRAIN IS NOT COMPUTAABLE

Dear Friends,

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511421/the-brain-is-not-computable/

Be Well.

David

The Brain Is Not Computable

A leading neuroscientist says Kurzweil’s Singularity isn’t going to happen. Instead, humans will assimilate machines.

 

Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is “a bunch of hot air.”

“The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it,” says Nicolelis, author of several pioneering papers on brain-machine interfaces.

The Singularity, of course, is that moment when a computer super-intelligence emerges and changes the world in ways beyond our comprehension.

Among the idea’s promoters are futurist Ray Kurzweil, recently hired on at Google as a director of engineering, who has been predicting that not only will machine intelligence exceed our own, but people will be able to download their thoughts and memories into computers (see “Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a Mind at Google—and Have It Serve You”).

Nicolelis calls that idea sheer bunk. “Downloads will never happen,” he said during remarks made at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Sunday. “There are a lot of people selling the idea that you can mimic the brain with a computer.”

The debate over whether the brain is a kind of computer has been running for decades. Many scientists think it’s possible, in theory, for a computer to equal the brain given sufficient computer power and an understanding of how the brain works.

Kurzweil delves into the idea of “reverse-engineering” the brain in his latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, in which he says even though the brain may be immensely complex, “the fact that it contains many billions of cells and trillions of connections does not necessarily make its primary method complex.”

But Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells, Nicolelis says.

“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”

The neuroscientist, originally from Brazil, instead thinks that humans will increasingly subsume machines (an idea, incidentally, that’s also part of Kurzweil’s predictions).

In a study published last week, for instance, Nicolelis’s group at Duke used brain implants to allow mice to sense infrared light, something mammals can’t normally perceive. They did it by wiring a head-mounted infrared sensor to electrodes implanted into a part of the brain called the somatosensory cortex.

The experiment, in which several mice were able to follow sensory cues from the infrared detector to obtain a reward, was the first ever to use a neural implant to add a new sense to an animal, Nicolelis says. 

That’s important because the human brain has evolved to take the external world—our surroundings and the tools we use—and create representations of them in our neural pathways. As a result, a talented basketball player perceives the ball “as just an extension of himself” says Nicolelis.

Similarly, Nicolelis thinks in the future humans with brain implants might be able to sense x-rays, operate distant machines, or navigate in virtual space with their thoughts, since the brain will accommodate foreign objects including computers as part of itself.

Recently, Nicolelis’s Duke lab has been looking to put an exclamation point on these ideas. In one recent experiment, they used a brain implant so that a monkey could control a full-body computer avatar, explore a virtual world, and even physically sense it.

In other words, the human brain creates models of tools and machines all the time, and brain implants will just extend that capability. Nicolelis jokes that if he ever opened a retail store for brain implants, he’d call it Machines “R” Us.

But if he’s right, us ain’t machines, and never will be.

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Antonio Regalado Senior Editor, Business

I am the business editor of MIT Technology Review. I look for stories about how technology is changing business. Before joining MIT Technology Review in July 2011, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where I wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science... continue »

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17:02:2013 -- The Drones Come Home

Dear Friends,

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/unmanned-flight/horgan-text

Be Well.

David

Unmanned Flight

 

The Drones Come Home

Unmanned aircraft have proved their prowess against al Qaeda. Now they’re poised to take off on the home front. Possible missions: patrolling borders, tracking perps, dusting crops. And maybe watching us all?

By John Horgan

Photograph by Joe McNally

At the edge of a stubbly, dried-out alfalfa field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant, hazy sky. It’s not a vulture or crow but a Falcon—a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff ’s office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon’s potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone’s flickering images of a nearby highway.

Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora, Colorado. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds. Powered by an electric motor, it carries two swiveling cameras, visible and infrared, and a GPS-guided autopilot. Sophisticated enough that it can’t be exported without a U.S. government license, the Falcon is roughly comparable, Miser says, to the Raven, a hand-launched military drone—but much cheaper. He plans to sell two drones and support equipment for about the price of a squad car.

A law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. But for now Mesa County, with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to fly one. The sheriff ’s office has a three-foot-wide helicopter drone called a Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 20 minutes.

The Falcon can fly for an hour, and it’s easy to operate. “You just put in the coordinates, and it flies itself,” says Benjamin Miller, who manages the unmanned aircraft program for the sheriff ’s office. To navigate, Johnson types the desired altitude and airspeed into the laptop and clicks targets on a digital map; the autopilot does the rest. To launch the Falcon, you simply hurl it into the air. An accelerometer switches on the propeller only after the bird has taken flight, so it won’t slice the hand that launches it.

The stench from a nearby chicken-processing plant wafts over the alfalfa field. “Let’s go ahead and tell it to land,” Miser says to Johnson. After the deputy sheriff clicks on the laptop, the Falcon swoops lower, releases a neon orange parachute, and drifts gently to the ground, just yards from the spot Johnson clicked on. “The Raven can’t do that,” Miser says proudly.

Offspring of 9/11

A dozen years ago only two communities cared much about drones. One was hobbyists who flew radio-controlled planes and choppers for fun. The other was the military, which carried out surveillance missions with unmanned aircraft like the General Atomics Predator.

Then came 9/11, followed by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and drones rapidly became an essential tool of the U.S. armed forces. The Pentagon armed the Predator and a larger unmanned surveillance plane, the Reaper, with missiles, so that their operators—sitting in offices in places like Nevada or New York—could destroy as well as spy on targets thousands of miles away. Aerospace firms churned out a host of smaller drones with increasingly clever computer chips and keen sensors—cameras but also instruments that measure airborne chemicals, pathogens, radioactive materials.

The U.S. has deployed more than 11,000 military drones, up from fewer than 200 in 2002. They carry out a wide variety of missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be “the last fighter with an ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.”

At least 50 other countries have drones, and some, notably China, Israel, and Iran, have their own manufacturers. Aviation firms—as well as university and government researchers—are designing a flock of next-generation aircraft, ranging in size from robotic moths and hummingbirds to Boeing’s Phantom Eye, a hydrogen-fueled behemoth with a 150-foot wingspan that can cruise at 65,000 feet for up to four days.

More than a thousand companies, from tiny start-ups like Miser’s to major defense contractors, are now in the drone business—and some are trying to steer drones into the civilian world. Predators already help Customs and Border Protection agents spot smugglers and illegal immigrants sneaking into the U.S. NASA-operated Global Hawks record atmospheric data and peer into hurricanes. Drones have helped scientists gather data on volcanoes in Costa Rica, archaeological sites in Russia and Peru, and flooding in North Dakota.

So far only a dozen police departments, including ones in Miami and Seattle, have applied to the FAA for permits to fly drones. But drone advocates—who generally prefer the term UAV, for unmanned aerial vehicle—say all 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. are potential customers. They hope UAVs will soon become essential too for agriculture (checking and spraying crops, finding lost cattle), journalism (scoping out public events or celebrity backyards), weather forecasting, traffic control. “The sky’s the limit, pun intended,” says Bill Borgia, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. “Once we get UAVs in the hands of potential users, they’ll think of lots of cool applications.”

The biggest obstacle, advocates say, is current FAA rules, which tightly restrict drone flights by private companies and government agencies (though not by individual hobbyists). Even with an FAA permit, operators can’t fly UAVs above 400 feet or near airports or other zones with heavy air traffic, and they must maintain visual contact with the drones. All that may change, though, under the new law, which requires the FAA to allow the “safe integration” of UAVs into U.S. airspace.

If the FAA relaxes its rules, says Mark Brown, the civilian market for drones—and especially small, low-cost, tactical drones—could soon dwarf military sales, which in 2011 totaled more than three billion dollars. Brown, a former astronaut who is now an aerospace consultant in Dayton, Ohio, helps bring drone manufacturers and potential customers together. The success of military UAVs, he contends, has created “an appetite for more, more, more!” Brown’s PowerPoint presentation is called “On the Threshold of a Dream.”

Dreaming in Dayton

Drone fever is especially palpable in Dayton, cradle of American aviation, home of the Wright brothers and of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Even before the recent recession, Dayton was struggling. Over the past decade several large companies, including General Motors, have shut down operations here. But Dayton’s airport is lined with advertisements for aerospace companies; an ad for the Predator Mission Aircrew Training System shows two men in flight suits staring stoically at a battery of computer monitors. The city is dotted with drone entrepreneurs. “This is one of the few new industries with a chance to grow rapidly,” Brown says.

One of those entrepreneurs is Donald Smith, a bearish former Navy aircraft technician with ginger hair and a goatee. His firm, UA Vision, manufactures a delta-wing drone called the Spear. Made of polystyrene foam wrapped in woven carbon fiber or other fabrics, the Spear comes in several sizes; the smallest has a four-foot wingspan and weighs less than four pounds. It resembles a toy B-1 bomber. Smith sees it being used to keep track of pets, livestock, wildlife, even Alzheimer’s patients—anything or anyone equipped with radio-frequency identification tags that can be read remotely.

In the street outside the UA Vision factory a co-worker tosses the drone into the air, and Smith takes control of it with a handheld device. The drone swoops up and almost out of sight, plummets, corkscrews, loops the loop, skims a deserted lot across the street, arcs back up, and then slows down until it seems to hover, motionless, above us. Smith grins at me. “This plane is fully aerobatic,” he says.

A few miles away at Wright-Patterson stands the Air Force Institute of Technology, a center of military drone research. A bronze statue of a bedraggled winged man, Icarus, adorns the entrance—a symbol both of aviation daring and of catastrophic navigation error. In one of the labs John Raquet, a balding, bespectacled civilian, is designing new navigation systems for drones.

GPS is vulnerable, he explains. Its signals can be blocked by buildings or deliberately jammed. In December 2011, when a CIA drone crashed in Iran, authorities there claimed they had diverted it by hacking its GPS. Raquet’s team is working on a system that would allow a drone to also navigate visually, like a human pilot, using a camera paired with pattern-recognition software. The lab’s goal, Raquet repeatedly emphasizes, is “systems that you can trust.”

A drone equipped with his visual navigation system, Racquet says, might even recognize power lines and drain electricity from them with a “bat hook,” recharging its batteries on the fly. (This would be stealing, so Raquet would not recommend it for civilians.) He demonstrates the stunt for me with a square drone powered by rotors at each corner. On the first try the drone, buzzing like a nest of enraged hornets, flips over. On the second it crashes into a wall. “This demonstrates the need for trust,” Raquet says with a strained smile. Finally the quad-rotor wobbles into the air and drapes a hook over a cable slung across the room.

Down the hall from Raquet’s lab, Richard Cobb is trying to make drones that “hide in plain sight.” DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has challenged researchers to build drones that mimic the size and behavior of bugs and birds. Cobb’s answer is a robotic hawk moth, with wings made of carbon fiber and Mylar. Piezoelectric motors flap the wings 30 times a second, so rapidly they vanish in a blur. Fashioning bug-size drones that can stay aloft for more than a few minutes, though, will require enormous advances in battery technology. Cobb expects it to take more than a decade.

The Air Force has nonetheless already constructed a “micro-aviary” at Wright-Patterson for flight-testing small drones. It’s a cavernous chamber—35 feet high and covering almost 4,000 square feet—with padded walls. Micro-aviary researchers, much of whose work is classified, decline to let me witness a flight test. But they do show me an animated video starring micro-UAVs that resemble winged, multi-legged bugs. The drones swarm through alleys, crawl across windowsills, and perch on power lines. One of them sneaks up on a scowling man holding a gun and shoots him in the head. The video concludes, “Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal: micro air vehicles.”

What, one might ask, will prevent terrorists and criminals from getting their hands on some kind of lethal drone? Although American officials rarely discuss the threat in public, they take it seriously. The militant Islamic group Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, says it has obtained drones from Iran. Last November a federal court sentenced a Massachusetts man to 17 years in prison for plotting to attack Washington, D.C., with drones loaded with C-4 explosives.

Exercises carried out by security agencies suggest that defending against small drones would be difficult. Under a program called Black Dart, a mini-drone two feet long tested defenses at a military range. A video from its onboard camera shows a puff of smoke in the distance, from which emerges a tiny dot that rapidly grows larger before whizzing harmlessly past: That was a surface-to-air missile missing its mark. In a second video an F-16 fighter plane races past the drone without spotting it.

The answer to the threat of drone attacks, some engineers say, is more drones. “The new field is counter-UAVs,” says Stephen Griffiths, an engineer for the Utah-based avionics firm Procerus Technologies. Artificial-vision systems designed by Procerus would enable one UAV to spot and destroy another, either by ramming it or shooting it down. “If you can dream it,” Griffiths says, “you can do it.” Eventually drones may become smart enough to operate autonomously, with minimal human supervision. But Griffiths believes the ultimate decision to attack will remain with humans.

Another Man’s Nightmare

Even when controlled by skilled, well-intentioned operators, drones can pose a hazard—that’s what the FAA is concerned about. The safety record of military drones is not reassuring. Since 2001, according to the Air Force, its three main UAVs—the Predator, Global Hawk, and Reaper—have been involved in at least 120 “mishaps,” 76 of which destroyed the drone. The statistics don’t include drones operated by the other branches of the military or the CIA. Nor do they include drone attacks that accidentally killed civilians or U.S. or allied troops.

Even some proponents insist that drones must become much more reliable before they’re ready for widespread deployment in U.S. airspace. “No one should begrudge the FAA its mission of assuring safety, even if it adds significant costs to UAVs,” says Richard Scudder, who runs a University of Dayton laboratory that tests prototypes. One serious accident, Scudder points out, such as a drone striking a child playing in her backyard, could set the industry back years. “If we screw the pooch with this technology now,” he says, “it’s going to be a real mess.”

A drone crashing into a backyard would be messy; a drone crashing into a commercial airliner could be much worse. In Dayton the firm Defense Research Associates (DRA) is working on a “sense and avoid” system that would be cheaper and more compact than radar, says DRA project manager Andrew White. The principle is simple: A camera detects an object that’s rapidly growing larger and sends a signal to the autopilot, which swerves the UAV out of harm’s way. The DRA device, White suggests, could prevent collisions like the one that occurred in 2011 in Afghanistan, when a 400-pound Shadow drone smashed into a C-130 Hercules transport plane. The C-130 managed to land safely with the drone poking out of its wing.

The prospect of American skies swarming with drones raises more than just safety concerns. It alarms privacy advocates as well. Infrared and radio-band sensors used by the military can peer through clouds and foliage and can even—more than one source tells me—detect people inside buildings. Commercially available sensors too are extraordinarily sensitive. In Colorado, Chris Miser detaches the infrared camera from the Falcon, points it at me, and asks me to place my hand on my chest for just a moment. Several seconds later the live image from the camera still registers the heat of my handprint on my T-shirt.

During the last few years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, unmanned aircraft monitored Baghdad 24/7, turning the entire city into the equivalent of a convenience store crammed with security cameras. After a roadside bombing U.S. officials could run videos in reverse to track bombers back to their hideouts. This practice is called persistent surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) worries that as drones become cheaper and more reliable, law enforcement agencies may be tempted to carry out persistent surveillance of U.S. citizens. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but it’s not clear how courts will apply that to drones.

What Jay Stanley of the ACLU calls his “nightmare scenario” begins with drones supporting “mostly unobjectionable” police raids and chases. Soon, however, networks of linked drones and computers “gain the ability to automatically track multiple vehicles and bodies as they move around a city,” much as the cell phone network hands calls from one tower to the next. The nightmare climaxes with authorities combining drone video and cell phone tracking to build up databases of people’s routine comings and goings—databases they can then mine for suspicious behavior. Stanley’s nightmare doesn’t even include the possibility that police drones might be armed.

Who’s Driving?

The invention that escapes our control, proliferating whether or not it benefits humanity, has been a persistent fear of the industrial age—with good reason. Nuclear weapons are too easy an example; consider what cars have done to our landscape over the past century, and it’s fair to wonder who’s in the driver’s seat, them or us. Most people would say cars have, on the whole, benefited humanity. A century from now there may be the same agreement about drones, if we take steps early on to control the risks.

At the Mesa County sheriff ’s office Benjamin Miller says he has no interest in armed drones. “I want to save lives, not take lives,” he says. Chris Miser expresses the same sentiment. When he was in the Air Force, he helped maintain and design lethal drones, including the Switchblade, which fits in a backpack and carries a grenade-size explosive. For the Falcon, Miser envisions lifesaving missions. He pictures it finding, say, a child who has wandered away from a campground. Successes like that, he says, would prove the Falcon’s value. They would help him “feel a lot better about what I’m doing.”

Science writer John Horgan’s most recent book is The End of War. Joe McNally likes technology; his photos of the electrical grid appeared in July 2010.

15:02:2013 -- Psychiatric Drugs Changing Fish Behavior

Dear Friends,

And what do U think happens when U eat these fish?

http://www.insidescience.org/content/psychiatric-drugs-changing-fish-behavior/939

Psychiatric Drugs Changing Fish Behavior

An European Perch, (Perca fluviatilis).

Image credit: 

Image Courtesy of Bent Christensen

Rights information: 

http://bit.ly/LDFc85

Pharmaceuticals are reaching waterways and affecting the way fish act.

Originally published: 

Feb 14 2013 - 2:00pm

By: 

Ker Than, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS) -- Psychiatric medicines that are excreted by humans and find their way into waterways can change the behavior of fish in rivers and streams, scientists report in a new study.

Researchers found that wild European perch exposed to the anxiety-moderating drug oxazepam in an experimental pond in Sweden were less fearful and are more aggressive feeders.

Ecologists worry that such changes in fish behavior could lead to unexpected ecological consequences, including changing the composition of species in waterways and increasing the risk of potentially toxic algal blooms.

"This is only one of hundreds of kinds of [pharmaceutical drugs] that are passed through wastewater plants, and we don't know what their environmental effects will be," said study coauthor Micael Jonsson, an ecologist at Sweden's Umea University.

The new study, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science, also found that water downstream from sewage treatment plants in Sweden contain concentrations of Oxazepam that experiments have shown are capable of changing fish behavior.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that pharmaceutical drugs can do more than just poison fish or change their physical characteristics. An earlier study conducted by scientists in Minnesota at St. Cloud State University showed that fathead minnows exposed to various antidepressants in the laboratory were slower at avoiding predators.

This latest study expands the list of mood altering chemicals to a different class of drugs – those used to treat anxiety disorders.

"Before this, people had talked at [scientific] meetings about how you would expect this kind of drug to affect fish behavior, but what these researchers have done is show, very elegantly, how fish behavior has changed, and not just one aspect either, but several aspects," said Patrick Phillips, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Troy, N.Y., who was not involved in the study.

Perch are normally shy and hunt in schools. But Jonsson and his team found that those exposed to Oxazepam were bolder, less interested in hanging out with the group, and more likely to strike out on their own to explore novel, potentially dangerous areas.

"We were actually a bit surprised because [Oxazepam] is supposed have a soothing effect. Humans usually become calmer. But we saw the opposite in fish," Jonsson said.

Normally, perch are constantly on the lookout for larger predator fish. The researchers speculate that the medicated perch are bolder because they are calmer.

"When they get exposed to this drug, they lose that inhibition, so they don't care anymore," Jonsson said.

Not only were the medicated perch braver, they also ate faster. In the long term, this combination of fearlessness and a larger appetite could lead to ecological disturbances that are hard to predict, scientists warn. Perch feed on tiny microorganisms called zooplankton, which in turn feed on algae.

"If the zooplankton decrease in number, the algae might increase, and you could have a situation where you have more algal blooms," Jonsson said.

Alternatively, the perch population might actually decrease because drugs have made them foolhardy towards predators. But then again, "we don't know how larger fish will react to this kind of medication," Jonsson said.

There is also worry that some drug effects on wildlife won't be apparent for years or decades.

"We're just beginning to understand what the ultimate consequences may be from these kinds of exposures," said research hydrologist Dana Kolpin, of the USGS Toxics Substances Hydrology Program, who also did not participate in the study.

According to scientists, it's also likely that the ecological changes they worry about are already happening.

"It's not all of a sudden that [medicines] are in the environment," Kolpin said. "There are papers going back to the 1970s that say pharmaceuticals are potential environmental contaminants. We just didn't have the analytical tools until more recently [to prove it]."

Most studies have shown that humans are unlikely to be affected by trace amounts of drugs in drinking water, but Kolpin suggests more research is needed.

"We just do not know enough about aspects such as sensitive populations" – including infants and pregnant women – "or effects from chronic exposures to complex chemical mixtures," Kolpin said.

Jonsson and his team stressed that the solution to the problem is not to stop medicating ill people, but to develop ways for sewage treatment plants to capture environmentally hazardous drugs.

Experts say technology exists that can reduce, if not fully purge, drugs from waste water, but upgrading every waste treatment plant would be prohibitively expensive.

A more sensible, and realistic, approach would be to identify those classes of medicines that are most harmful to wildlife.

"We are realizing that some compounds are worse actors than others, and if we can identify those, then we can be more targeted in our approach for preventing their release into the environment," Kolpin said.

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Ker Than is a freelance writer based in Southern California.