Time's Battleland: Drones + biometrics: Weapons that conquer globalization's frontiers

Cool NYT story on the US military's use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the same technology here in the States, along with the usual fears of loss of privacy.  Trust me, along with drones, these frontier-settling technologies will most definitely infiltrate our society in coming years, just like the military's Internet and GPS did before.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

I first wrote about this concept in Blueprint for Action in the final chapter called "blogging the future."

Comments

[Joshua Sterns]

This article sparked a wide range of ideas from future block busters to more practical applications.

The fear of future tech stealing freedom can be made into a great movie. Drones used by the secret big brother government to keep track of everyone. Then there is the easy bad guy route. Rogue group threatens attacks with super sophisticated tech stolen from (or created for) the USA. I'm sure something can be reworked from the past thirty years of sci fi/action films.

I can see a huge market for Drones that fight fires. Super soakers instead of missiles. They also coud be used for search and rescue missions.

People should be weary of additional freedoms being taken away, but that doesn't mean the potential for good should be ignored.