> technology is being put in place faster than
> we can come up with privacy safeguards to
> deal with it.

Absolutely true. But progress, especially technological progress, has always been about things besides "safeguards." People who wanna be safe are, y'know, dead anyway, just like the rest of us.

Sigh. The zombies, brainwashed and the sheeple have given away damn near everything that millions on millions of brave men and women fought and died to save and protect.

First of all, no man on Earth is suave enough to get away with using "Sigh" as a rhetorical exclamation in print. (I tried it once verbally after reading it in a comic book and the family teased me so harshly that it never happened again. This was a loving home, and there's much to be grateful for.)

Second, the second sentence is indulgently defeatist. We've lost a lot of liberty in the past twenty years, but we've gained a lot of new powers and insight as well. This is part of the earlier point: We do not know how technology is going to pan out.

This was one of the most interesting tweets of the year. Consider it in terms of the continuing collapse of public finances. Would you rather face a drone outside your window, or a careerist police officer who's going to retire early and suck off the public teat for another thirty or forty years following his 'service'?

Here's the thing about the drones: The guy on the street will have countermeasures.

(more)

See this speech, at least that first twenty minutes after the introduction. Open source tech can be deployed too quickly and too cheaply for the government to keep up. Miraculous, world-changing things are going to be done before Obama and Romney can remember to tax or regulate them.

Listen, I believe in cynicism as a way of life: I practice it with ritual devotion each and every day, honing my discipline with a ferocity that makes Buddhists monks and Zoroastrian masters look like drunken disco dancers who can't get laid. I am credentialed; I am dark.

But despair is a sin.

Privacy aside - what about the possible health harm from all these damn rays and beams being shot at us and theough us? How much damn scanning and laser-beaming can one human body take? Can some of these crack Phd's please get on THAT?

First of all, no man on Earth is suave enough to get away with using "Sigh" as a rhetorical exclamation in print.

shrug

Amy, Amy, Amy...

"The US Department of Homeland Security will be able to beam a laser at us from 164 feet away, analyzing the molecules of our bodies...whatever meal we're digesting inside our guts, whatever gun powder residue might have clung to terrorists, whatever drugs are floating around in our urine...without us even knowing it's happening"

If your urine was vaporized in your bladder by a giant laser, you'd know it was happening.

Think about the thousands of soldiers who've been killed or injured by roadside bombs and suicide bombers in Afghanistan. Did it occur to you that if the US military possessed the magical device described here, every one of those bombs could have been detected & detonated at a safe distance, every one of those soldiers could have been spared, the Taliban would have been annihilated, and there would have been a ticker-tape victory parade down Broadway by now? You never thought that your government might prefer to hand this magical device over to Seal Team Six, rather than Thedala Magee?

Mass spectrometers have been around in one form or another for more than a century. I used lots of them in my analytical chemistry classes. Laser Ablation Electrospray Ionization was first developed decades ago. A tiny sample - of your urine, say - is put in a little vial, sometimes mixed with a solution that absorbs laser light. It's zapped, vaporized, and ionized (turned into charged particles with different mass-to-charge ratios). These ions are then separated and detected. That's it. When lasers are used, they're not very powerful, and they're not 164 feet away, they're right there next to the sample. No matter how fancy the contraption is, it can't do anything with your urine while it's still in your bladder! And besides that, the data is printed out in the form of mass spectra & chromatograms that need to be interpreted by skilled technicians, not by functional illiterates in TSA uniforms.

Giving credence to hysterical claims like this without first checking out the basic chemistry & physics involved does not help your valiant cause against the TSA. It really doesn't.

Following the links, I read about the guy in Dubai who was jailed for marijuana, about a grain of sugar's worth, found on the bottom of his shoe! Now that's scary.

Personally, I haven't worried about my privacy since I first learned about phone taps and "bugs". I figured if the Feds wanted me, they could find me. And with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, not to mention every other freaking site you visit or business you buy from, you may as well forget about privacy anyway. Oh, and your phone. Forgot to mention the phones. No privacy there, either.

That IN-Q-TEL & Genia (which sound like something from one of my husband's comics) have joined forces seems perfectly natural. I must confess I didn't know about either of them until I followed the links, but after reading about them, they seem like a logical match-up.

And Deb--as far as how much of this crap the human body can take, I'm betting they already know. I'll bet it's been tested. A lot.