Along the lines of Google Suggest, which replaces your own thoughts with intrusive suggestions, the cheery little police state in Britain is exploring some anticipatory thought control of its own:

“The technology, called Sigard, monitors movements and speech to detect signs of threatening behaviour.

Its designers claim the system can anticipate anti-social behaviour and violence by analysing the information picked up its sensors.

They say alerts are then sent to police, nightclub bouncers or shop security staff, which allow them to nip trouble in the bud before arguments spiral into violence.

The devices are designed to distinguish between distress calls, threatening behaviour and general shouting.

The system, produced by Sound Intelligence, is being used in Dutch prisons, city centres and Amsterdam’s Central Rail Station.

Coventry City Council is funding a pilot project which has for six months and has installed seven devices in the nightlife area on the High Street.

Dylan Sharpe, from Big Brother Watch, said: “There can be no justification for giving councils or the police the capability to listen in on private conversations.

“There is enormous potential for abuse, or a misheard word, causing unnecessary harm with this sort of intrusive and overbearing surveillance.”

A CV1 spokesman said: “We had the system for six months. It is no longer in use.”

No one from the organisation was available to comment on whether the trial was a success.

The new Coalition Government has announced a review of the use of CCTV with a pledge to tilt the balance away from snooping by the authorities to defend civil liberties.”

Read the rest of this article at The Telegraph, UK.

(Hat-tip to Crytogon)

My Comment:

Notice, please, that it’s not violent behavior that is being targeted but the much broader and more nebulous category of “anti-social behavior.”  Does that also include asocial behavior? Wouldn’t it set the stage for  targeting people who simply don’t “socialize” as expected? Next thing you know the target will be anyone who spends a lot of time alone….or doesn’t vote…or drinks by themselves… or doesn’t smile at strangers…

Second point. How on earth does a machine distinguish between contexts and how does it figure out what’s rowdiness and what’s threatening? People can’t seem to do it themselves. But that’s precisely what the new field of Neurobotics plans to do. Remote brain control is the game.

This kind of “mind-reading” to determine intentions is very close to what Google has already developed in  Google Suggest with its intrusive and often odd “suggestions” for search items.  Hundreds of people have found themselves victimized by Google’s penchant for fishing out even the most flimsy allegation, rumor, or libel, and treating it as a fact of equal importance to something that’s been documented.

In some circles, such slander isn’t even regarded as an injury to anyone. There’s no right to privacy, say some libertarians, who are otherwise quick to defend the immutable rights of people to blackmail, pimp, extort and defraud. The reasoning behind the attacks on privacy is specious enough that it can be dismantled by examining  the definitions alone, but lush rhetoric carries the day. Privacy is discarded in theory and the practical result is one’s own thoughts today are no longer one’s own.

Can technologies like Google Suggest be manipulated? Sure they can. I’ve already blogged about this in relation to Wikipedia (another form of thought control by the corporate-state), social media rankings and social networks. The idea that the web is a kind of “free market” where buyer and seller bargain in blissful transparency is thus demonstrably untrue, unless, of course, by free market you mean what’s we’ve been enduring for the past few decades from the corporatocracy.