Meeting notice: 06-02-98 7:30 NE43-773 (545 Tech Sq.)
                     
Proposed topic: Law Enforcement in the Nanotech era

A topic commonly arising when contemplating the NT
culture is the likely difficulty of assuring any
satisfying degree of physical privacy and the
implications of that difficulty for the culture.  One
subset of that question is the nature of law
enforcement and its relation to the society.

Fortunately or not we do not need to wait for the 
invention of replicators to explore this issue. The 
LEAs are on the lip of a wave of technologies that 
will expand their powers enormously, including unmanned 
aerial vehicles (such as microblimps), molecular sensing 
(of which DNA fingerprinting is just one instance),  
automated face recognizers, among many other technologies 
(see http://www.pnl.gov/news/1998/bnw98_17.htm).

We appear to be close to a society in which it will
next to impossible to commit any of a long list of
crimes, with the probable exception of information
crimes like gambling and some domestic crimes.  Street
crimes, like rape and mugging and even street
prostitution, should vanish almost entirely.  It is
hard to see anything like the current traffic in
prohibited substances continuing when every cop and cop
car carries the equivalent of the best drug dog that
ever lived, when the DEA can locate and therefore burn 
most pot plants growing under the open sky, and when 
packages coming over the border can be microprobed.
Every traffic offense will be detectable.  The INS will
have an iron grasp on our borders.  The EPA will catch
wetlands violators before they can fill their shovel 
twice.  The IRS will survey assets in backyards, total 
up their value by searching online catalogs, and file 
evasion charges accordingly.

On the face of it this seems like a nightmarish
prospect.  But is it?  Are there compensations?
And if not, can anything be done?


Nanonews

	
     First TableTop Source Of Concentrated
     X-Rays Built 

     ANN ARBOR---Researchers at the University of Michigan's Center
     for Ultrafast Optical Sciences have built the first table-top
     laser capable of generating a coherent beam of X-rays. 

http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/um-ftsoc.html
                 ................................

     Note: The Second International Conference on Complex Systems
     will be held at Nashua, NH, from October 25-October 30.	

http://necsi.org
                 .................................

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hapgood@pobox.com