The US is becoming more of a police state every day. In the face of massive public disapproval, Congress has legislated the creation of a national ID card. Police routinely search bags and large containers of people entering the subway (at least in NYC). TSA agents, now officers of the federal government, routinely search the persons and property of air passengers. These are just the day-to-day intrusions - at a deeper level, federal agents can now obtain all manner of financial and personal information (including, of course, a physical search of residence) without even informing the target of the investigation.

Most of this has been introduced recently in the name of fighting terrorism. It is interesting to note that the public outcry one might have expected has been decidedly muted: to a great extent, Americans seem to accept that these measures are necessary to protect them from the much more frightening threat of terrorism.

It would be uncharacteristic of me to discuss this sentiment without bringing up the question of whether these measures are effective at preventing terrorism or apprehending terrorists (they're not) or the fact that these kinds of arguments have always been used to manipulate the populace into submitting to greater and greater intrusions of those in power. I ask the forgiveness of the reader as I will not attempt to substantiate these claims: these are subjects that have been dealt with extensively by others.

There is, however, a more interesting (and less discussed) subject here: what is the long term impact of these trends when coupled with the growth of technology?

It does not require a significant mental leap to find this prospect frightening. We already have digital camera technology down to the point where electronic monitoring of all urban public spaces is feasible. There are some serious efforts underway to create very small flying robots to allow law enforcement and military personnel to perform very specific remote monitoring tasks. And, of course, for years we have had efforts such as CALEA and Carnivore to expand the ability of law enforcement to intercept all communications everywhere.

At present, the abuses of this kind of technology are inherently limited by human factors. To watch everyone everywhere requires a huge number of watchers. But what happens when you combine surveillance technology with artificial intelligence? The AI in question doesn't need to be of human-level intelligence: it need only be able to discern "unusual" activity and alert a human watcher. This would provide a huge amount of leverage, enabling a single watcher to monitor the activities of hundreds of subjects.

This kind of technology is far from science fiction. We already have software to perform such things as gait analysis, facial analysis and the recognition of specific keywords in an audio stream. There is reason to believe that these sorts of "fuzzy analysis" of vague concepts such as strange behavior are well within our reach in the near term.

To be fair, one might say that the new dangers involved in technological expansion demand new tools to keep those dangers in check. To quote the typical example: how do we deal with terrorists with nukes?

This concern only becomes more pronounced when we consider the availability of even more powerful technologies. In Bill Joy's famous Wired article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html Why the future doesn't need us), Joy discusses the dangers of nanotech, biotech and AI when placed in the hands of dangerous people. We cannot ignore the possibility of a terrorist trying to destroy the world with a plague or "gray goo."

So the ultimate question here is: how do we deal with tremendous technological power on the personal scale?

The answer, based on current trends, is that we prohibit these dangerous technologies at the personal level and instead use them for widespread monitoring of the populace to insure that no one obtains them (or applies any low-tech methods of grand destruction).

The grand dystopian manifestation of this would be a society in which all of our minds are monitored by benevolent AIs who provide for our every need and make sure that we don't step out of line. Of course, the definition of "stepping out of line" varies arbitrarily based on the popular demons of the zeitgeist. If we were to project our current values into this future, we would be sure to discover that some form of intervention would be applied for thoughts of racism or child abuse. To those who believe that democracy protects us for this sort of scenario, I can only point out that democracy has traditionally been the source of of this sort of enforcement of morality, not a limiting factor.

Perhaps it doesn't have to be like this. Perhaps there are alternatives that balance personal freedom with security so that young future technologists will be free to play with their toy nanotech kits while not causing the rest of us to fear world destruction. My personal dream is that we all embrace the ideal of mutual respect, making all of these checking mechanisms - including government - unnecessary. Since, at this time, this would seem to involve the prospect of forced behavior modification (a prospect even more disturbing than "happy AI overlord land") I am not optimistic.

But one thing we can do is try to focus our intrusions in the areas that are most specific to our concerns: if we fear nuclear terrorism, focus on creating detectors for nuclear materials. If we are concerned about agencies being obstructed from monitoring the communications of terrorist organizations, put checks and balances into the monitoring so that we can be sure that these new powers are only used for monitoring terrorists.

As it stands, we are merely augmenting the power of the authorities. If this trend is not curtailed, it will inevitably result in something Orwellian.