The prevailing view at the AI Lab is that control by the mass media over all things political is coming to an end. In its place will be a back-to-basics, Jeffersonian conversation among the citizenry. “It is the opposite of TV blasting stuff out to people’s living rooms.”
For the first time in history, the National Security Agency “is now deeply involved in the design of the public telecommunications network.” … The involvement of the National Security Agency in the design of our telephone networks is a violation of federal statutes … If the National Security Agency, FBI, and other law enforcement organizations have their way – the design of the national telecommunications network will end up classified and withheld from the public.
Designing these technologies into future networks, which include all telephone systems, would ensure that law enforcement organizations “have the same capabilities [they] enjoy right now.”
In January, Vice President [Al] Gore had promised that the White House would work to ensure that the NII [National Information Infrastructure] would “help law enforcement agencies thwart criminals and terrorists who might use advanced telecommunications to commit crimes.” … His pledge went unnoticed by the mainstream press. Notwithstanding that it fell on reporters’ deaf ears, Gore dropped a bombshell. Forget Ross Perot’s NAFTA-inspired “giant sucking sound.” This was the dull “thump” of Law Enforcement running over the privacy rights of the American public on its way – at the on-ramp?? – to the information superhighway. The real crime is that the collision barely dented the damn fender.
It becomes a way of further distancing the cop from the suspect. It is difficult to hit or shoot another human being. It is easier if you have a teleoperated mechanical prosthesis doing it for you. There would be a desensitization here that I’d be concerned with … We need to be careful about crossing the threshold of a new technology, especially a destructive one, without being clear on what we’re doing and why. We need to ask ourselves if we want to cross that threshold, or if the momentum is already too great, how we might divert it. There is a tendency for these predatory technologies to gain a momentum of their own.
Within 10 years, a system offering VR telepresence control of a robotic cop could be available … There are more problems with cops in the field than there will be with robots…under these life and death situations. For one thing, the entire session will be recorded, so there will be greater accountability. Violence occurs through loss of control. Not having officers’ lives in jeopardy will allow them to maintain their cool.
Will increasingly lethal weapons be mounted on “robot cops”? Will autonomous robots with AI brains ever be given decision-making powers? … Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround,” a short story published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942, introduced the word robotics as well as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which have since become part of scientific folklore. The first law – “a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” – is clearly open for review in light of current events.
The administration is trying to impose Clipper on us by manipulating market forces. By purchasing massive numbers of Clipper devices, they intend to induce an economy of scale which will make them cheap while the export embargo renders all competition either expensive or nonexistent. We have to use the market to fight back. While it’s unlikely that they’ll back down on Clipper deployment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that with sufficient public involvement, we can get Congress to eliminate the export embargo.
I believe there is a strong, though currently untested, argument that outlawing unregulated crypto [and enforcing the use of the Clipper chip] would violate the First Amendment, which surely protects the manner of our speech as clearly as it protects the content. But of course the First Amendment is, like the rest of the Constitution, only as good as the government’s willingness to uphold it. And they are, as I say, in the mood to protect our safety over our liberty.
However they reached it, Clinton and Gore have an astonishingly simple bottom line, to which even the future of American liberty and prosperity is secondary: They believe that it is their responsibility to eliminate, by whatever means, the possibility that some terrorist might get a nuke and use it on, say, the World Trade Center. They have been convinced that such plots are more likely to ripen to hideous fruition behind a shield of encryption … We are dealing with religion here.