The Opaque Society, Part 1

Besides a certain debt to P.W. Singer’s Wired for War, the scenario below reflects my reading of David Brin’s ideas about the Transparent Society during the 1990s.

Brin proposed (briefly) that a) governmental and private surveillance technology was eroding citizens’ privacy, and b) one possible cure was to have truly ubiquitous surveillance, including publicly accessible cameras that watched the watchers. Brin wrote that this regime of many-to-many surveillance would tend to counter abuses of the surveillance system by those in power.

But what if you posit a sudden sharp increase in governmental surveillance, one that the great majority of the population favors, with no countervailing increase in citizen surveillance of the authorities? The scenario below features a single technology—automated scanning of surveillance-camera footage—that generates two distinct sets of problems for civilian and military policymakers to consider.

Assumptions: Surveillance cameras proliferate throughout U.S. cities. Automated facial scanning by these cameras helps officials track criminal suspects, but citizens in urban areas take countermeasures to foil such tracking. Meanwhile, the U.S. military adopts even more robust versions of this technology for use in war.

Civilian Scenario: In October 2012, U.S.-based terrorists stage a Mumbai-style attack, simultaneously barraging a middle school in San Diego; an elementary school in Newark; a shopping mall outside Chicago; and a pedestrian mall in Atlanta with pipe bombs and gunfire. The low-tech, low-budget attacks, designed to influence the approaching presidential election, cause hundreds of casualties and widespread panic.

Afterward, examination of surveillance-camera footage shows the perpetrators carefully surveilling their targets over a period of months; their ringleaders are even seen visiting all four sites.

To avoid missing these types of patterns in the future, both the U.S. government and private corporations dramatically expand the automated scanning of surveillance-camera footage. Computers sift through billions of hours of footage from millions of cameras, looking for suspicious activities or travel by individuals.

For example, thanks to telephoto lenses and powerful processors, computers can now confirm that a man leading his family to different rides at DisneyWorld is the same man who bought cigarettes at a store in Times Square two days earlier—all with no human sifting through the man’s records, or even knowledge of his name.

Although federal officials downplay civil-liberties concerns, this enormous increase in governmental surveillance power provokes a backlash. While Fourth Amendment challenges percolate through skeptical state and federal courts, citizens begin to conceal or even alter their facial appearance while in public.

Facial covering by Muslims is suddenly a side issue as thousands of city dwellers start covering their faces using various materials and configurations that foil visible-light and thermal imaging. Some even use an ever-changing selection of prosthetics to alter the appearance of the face itself.

While they are barred from concealing their appearance within government offices and businesses such as banks, disguise actually becomes hip in less-regulated settings. Some urban areas start to look like Halloween year-round as Klingon makeup, Elvis sideburns and Emperor Palpatine hoods proliferate among an increasing number of secular veils, fedoras and burqas.

The federal government responds by limiting how and how much citizens may conceal, leading to still other privacy-based court challenges. For the time being, however, hoods, veils and burqas become illegal, as do facial prosthetics, elective cosmetic surgeries, and even certain cold-weather clothing such as balaclavas.


Questions: On which side will the courts fall when there is no immediate national-security concern posed by covering one’s face and otherwise changing one’s appearance? Or does the sheer ability of governments and businesses to electronically observe every urban public space lead courts to conclude that civilians face a “reasonable expectation” that they will be observed?


The above is only the civilian side of this scenario. Stay tuned for the military implications of this CounterStory tomorrow.

The (Too-) Smart Bomb

Here’s the first of many near-future-conflict CounterStories. As with most good scenarios, this one is based on only a handful of technological, economic or social changes—but those seemingly small changes quickly add up to a different set of decisions that policy-makers might face. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think.--Paul Kretkowski

Assumptions: By the year 2016, global trade and shipping recover from the 2008–2010 recession, but high-seas piracy worsens as well. Manned offshore patrols remain as costly as ever, but technological advances enable cruise missiles to stay airborne for days rather than hours.

Scenario: The U.S. has deployed long-range, semi-autonomous cruise missiles to patrol international shipping lanes in regions where manned seagoing vessels are spread too thin. With human air-traffic controllers (ATCs) monitoring them, these missiles criss-cross areas around the Strait of Malacca and Gulf of Aden, for example, where piracy is rampant but enforcement vehicles and manpower are scarce.

The missiles loiter around shipping lanes and occasionally “interrogate” ships’ captains by radio to try to determine whether they are pirates. The missiles’ computers use a variety of criteria to rate whether or not a particular vessel is likely a pirate—the captain’s responses, ship’s tonnage, registry, destination and manifest. Human ATCs then decide whether to allow a legitimate-seeming vessel to proceed—or demand that an alleged pirate vessel surrender or be disabled or destroyed by the missile.

Since these cruise missiles are “smart” enough to be semi-autonomous, a single human ATC can monitor and manage several missiles at once, overseeing their day-to-day, largely scripted interrogations of international shipping—the robotic equivalent of today’s police DUI checkpoints.

On the high seas as elsewhere, though, manpower and attention are at a premium.

Off the Kenyan coast, pirates manage to seize a commercial ship and begin running it toward the nearest East African port, diverting Navy eyeballs and resources from monitoring cruise missiles deployed near the Gulf of Aden.

The suddenly busy human ATC uses a new option, that of switching most of his cruise missiles over to a fully automatic “crisis” mode while he focuses his attention elsewhere.

The cruise missiles near the Gulf of Aden continue to aggressively question civilian vessels about their ship and their intentions, just as before. Those ships take the missiles’ intrusiveness seriously because the cruise missile is nearly impossible for civilian vessels to counter, and flits in and out of radar range while it makes up its “mind” about the civilians’ status.

For the first time in history, humans are forced to engage in a sort of Turing-test-in-reverse administered by a machine, and must prove to a computer alone that they are not pirates.


This scenario raises several questions. As a “police” system, the cruise missiles and their ATCs normally err on the side of freeing the guilty rather than punishing the innocent. In “crisis” mode, though, the now-autonomous missiles make life-or-death decisions on their own, and opportunities for mistakes multiply.

What is the structure of checks and balances that might allow the ATC and the cruise missiles to make the right call, both morally and in accordance with maritime law? How would laws relating to piracy have to be modified to allow robotic cruise missiles to use disabling or deadly force without a positive order to do so? Is the trade-off of a more widespread maritime presence worth the potential cost in lives, should a cruise missile make the wrong decision?

For some interesting fiction that discusses machine volition and friend-or-foe problems, see Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” stories and Keith Laumer’s “Bolo” stories.

Upcoming Scenarios

For the past few weeks I’ve been periodically creating scenarios based on my reading of “Wired for War,” P.W. Singer’s book on the escalating use of robotic devices in warfare.

If the increasingly lethal, increasingly autonomous machines that Singer describes take the field—self-directing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), demining robots, tracked devices armed with rifles or rockets, small submersibles—they’ll change not just combat operations but the risks and opportunities policymakers face.

I chose to illustrate some of these challenges through scenarios, which may let readers quickly grasp how a new technology may cause a certain kind of future where simply describing that technology might not.

For example, today’s UAVs already make many decisions on their own, constantly adjusting their speed, direction, trim and angle of attack to remain airborne, while humans handle executive-level decisions about targeting and weapons use. The scenario I’ll publish in a few days, “The Too-Smart Bomb,” deals with the tactical and strategic consequences of using UAVs that are just slightly smaller and more independent than today’s.

I’m currently working on five other scenarios that deal with a backlash against face-scanning technology, slow robots that replace fast explosions as terrorists’ weapons of choice, high-speed urban mapping by the military, “magic” bullets that audit themselves, and cruise missiles that can interrogate pirates. Stay tuned for these and “The Too-Smart Bomb” in a few days.

NPR: The Future of Pot

For the inaugural post of this scenario-focused blog, I'll just quickly link to NPR's "What If Marijuana Were Legal?" scenario from today, which posits a world two years after the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use.

Even reporter John Barnett admits that this scenario failed to cover the biggest what-if among stoner conspiracy theorists: How will Big Tobacco react (and profit)? But it's a fun listen, particularly if you tune in at the middle of the story, where legalization is presented as a done deal, and having an ounce of marijuana on you creates no more trouble than if you were walking down the street with a sealed fifth of scotch.