An ever-growing list of brain activity monitoring technologies, agencies and programs have given rise to the notion of using what comes out of such ventures – mind reading abilities – for national security threat prevention via pre-crime surveillance.
SFGate reported Tuesday that ‘we may need to rethink freedom of thought’ due to mind reading nanotech, while The Information reported Monday that AI is now being used to read the mind, leading to ‘consequences from the data gold rush’.
During a 2006 congressional discussion regarding the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act which was aimed at greatly expanding U.S. government surveillance powers, congressman Pete Hoekstra, Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee spoke to the concept of using emerging technologies in the realm of ‘intention understanding’ to scan the public for potential terroristic thoughts.
“Our country needs to rapidly and effectively bring every intelligence tool to bear to find our enemies, detect and understand their intentions, and thwart their hostile and terrorist acts against our country and our people,” Hoekstra said.
The Congressman’s goal of utilizing ‘every’ intelligence tool to ‘detect and understand’ target’s intentions implies knowing what is being thought within the brains of whomever the government deems ‘interesting‘.
Hellbound and Down 