The Pentagon views information, and more specifically the Internet, as a critical front in future wars. How cool is that?
I mean, yes, Big Brother and all that.
But -- what a great source of business ideas. The military seeks a way to disrupt and control the entire EM spectrum. The James Bond movie Goldeneye features a fictionalized EM Pulse weapon, but such weapons are not entirely fictional. A terrorist could detonate a nuke miles above a city and destroy not just the city but response equipment for hundreds or even thousands of miles around. How about deploying communications systems that are not dependent on electromagnetics?
The military also wants to publish information on the net without the source being identified. How about a system that would create virtual identities and extend their reach across the world? Enter some demographic info for the persona you want to have say something. We'll create a back-story and hundreds of timestamped posts by that person on hundreds of different sites. Then we'll start planting the target message in critical places.
In my comms ethics classes, of course, we decry the perversion of media to commercial and other purposive ends. Expression ought to be unfettered, free, and complete. But I'm not convinced we live in the world many theorists would inhabit. I think we live in a grimy, gritty real place with masses of human beings -- each good and bad, smart and lazy in varying degrees, and each struggling for survival. Wars will happen, people will want to kill each other.
If we can prevent some of that, fight the wars with words and signals instead of bullets and bombs... Well, I believe that is a better course.
And am I ethically crippled because I look at this as a business opportunity? No. Business is the tool our society has chosen for creating progress. We are structured for no other way.
Comments (1)
Kicking this idea around with Rob, he suggested a mechanical system with long, steel rods and hammers. Tap one end of the rod, and have a mechanical system at the other end to detect the tap and trigger another tap on the next rod. You could send morse code over a system like that, or a more compressed message in binary. It would just depend on how closely you could time the taps.
Would a hydraulic system work better? A water-filled cable stretched over ten miles...?
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Ooh! What if you needed a system like this because something happened to the atmosphere that made it so any large stored charge would be destroyed? If there were regular fluxes moving across the surface of the earth, any attempt to build high-tech stuff would result in a fantastic explosion. That would keep a whole population technologically simple. Science fiction, of course.
Posted by Tom Dalton | February 7, 2006 2:59 PM
Posted on February 7, 2006 14:59