Posted by
David Zublick on Sunday, February 11, 2007 1:57:15 PM
Two stories that made news this week but which went mostly unnoticed
should raise the hairs on the back of the necks of most Americans.
A new report that a team of
neuroscientists
has developed a powerful technique that enables them too look into the
brain of a person and determine their intentions before they act should
raise alarm bells.
Serious ethical issues are raised by this
technology, which could actually turn law enforcement agencies and
those charged with protecting the security of this nation into
something reminiscent of the Steven Spielberg movie
Minority Report.
The
thought of someone having the ability to probe people's minds and
eavesdrop on their every thought is extremely frightening to those of
us concerned about our liberties and freedoms.
This technique
used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of brain
activity, then translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing
what a person planned to do in the near future. The dramatic research
which led to this discovery was built on a series of studies in which
brain activity was used to identify such things as lying, racial
prejudice and violence.
An ethical debate must be launched to determine the potential for the abuse this technology could unleash. In the movie
Minority Report,
set in the future, people are arrested, tried and convicted for crimes
they planned to commit but had not yet committed, as the result of
investigative techniques that included brain scans which probed a
person's intentions. If such science is now available, could not law
enforcement begin implementing these techniques to prevent crimes or
terrorist attacks from being perpetrated?
On the surface, this
may appear to be a good thing. But Professor John-Dylan Haynes of the
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany
who led the study with colleagues at University College London and
Oxford University, sees a danger that these techniques may one day
become compulsory, forcing individuals to prove that they were innocent
of a crime
they had not yet committed.
The
second story involved a man in Miami by the name of Issac Daniel, who
has invented a pair of sneakers implanted with a GPS tracking system,
enabling one's every move to be traced. The sneakers work when the
wearer presses a button on the shoes to activate the GPS. A wireless
alert is sent to a 24 hour
monitoring service that for a fee will follow the wearer.
On
the surface, this too sounds like a good thing. A missing child,
spouse, Alzheimer's patient could be located in an emergency. But, as
is already happening in some cases with things
such as
automobiles,
what if these tracking devices became compulsory, forcing the to be put
into all shoes, or even worse, implanted into human bodies where they
would be constantly monitored?
The potential for abuse and the loss of our liberties would be unfathomable.
The
thought that Big Brother could get into our bedrooms, our computers,
track our every move with GPS and implanted chips is frightening
enough. And now to know they can now also get into our brains should
scare the hell out of us.
We must be ever vigilant.
For
complete coverage of the war to protect our liberties, listen to
America Talks live Monday through Friday from 6-8 pm eastern time at www.americatalks.com.