BIG BROTHER IS HERE AND IS STAYING

---

Workplace surveillance was the leading privacy concern in 2000, according to an analysis recently released by the Privacy Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit group that performs research and educates the public on privacy issues. In 2000, millions of Americans were watched at work, as employers became increasingly concerned about employee productivity and their use of the Internet. Three-fourths of major U.S. companies now perform some type of in-house electronic surveillance, according to the American Management Association, and 28% of all companies surveyed now monitor e-mail.

The Big Brother tactic has led to some people losing their jobs. Dow Chemical fired 35 employees and disciplined 346 others in 2000 for allegedly storing and sending sexual or violent images on the company’s computers. Xerox, The New York Times Co., and the CIA were others that fired or disciplined employees because of alleged bad behavior.

Employers may be rightly concerned about security and productivity issues, or legal liability arising from e-mailed sexual banter. But pervasive or spot-check surveillance conducted through keystroke monitoring software, reviewing voice-mail messages, and using mini-video cameras will undoubtedly affect morale and labor law, as well as employee recruitment and retention practices.

In the future, the Privacy Foundation predicts that employers, especially so-called “New Economy” companies, may offer “spy-free” workplaces as a fringe benefit. But only as fringe benefit. Big Brother is here and staying—and, it’s only going to get worse. “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Big Brother Is Watching and Listening

“How the United States Spies on You,” read the afternoon headline in Le Monde, enough, certainly, to jolt Parisians on their commute home. Across Europe recently, politicians and the press were in full cry over a vast Anglo-American electronic surveillance system named “Echelon.” The system scans billions of private e-mails, faxes, and telephone conversations each hour, according to a report debated by the European Parliament. Echelon, said Parliament President Nicole Fontaine, is “a violation of the fundamental rights” of European Union citizens.

The most incendiary charge is that Echelon represents economic espionage nonpareil, helping the United States and its English-speaking allies steal trade (and jobs) from non-Anglos. But charges cited are mostly old, well-known cases: In 1994, U.S. intelligence discovered that French companies were offering bribes to Saudi Arabia and Brazil for multibillion-dollar contracts. Washington complained, and U.S. firms got the deals.

U.S. officials insisted last week that American intelligence does not steal trade secrets for U.S. firms. Even if it tried, the National Security Agency, which oversees Echelon, is drowning in data thanks to the global communications revolution. In some ways, people’s communications have never been safer from becoming intelligence. And France is certainly not a slouch in the industrial espionage arena.

Although it has the added spice of Internet-age privacy concerns, the Echelon flap revealed anew how Europe and the United States are increasingly at odds over matters from defense cooperation to genetically engineered “frankenfoods.” Just a few days earlier, a French intelligence report suggested the NSA helped create Microsoft to eavesdrop around the world. The loser this time may be the United Kingdom, whose special intelligence-sharing accord with Washington looks to some like disloyalty to the EU. George Orwell, after all, was English.

Speaking of Orwell, he would be either shocked or pleased on how close his book 1984 is to reality. Meet John Norseen: He’s going to read your mind and inject you with smart thoughts.

BioFusion

Buck Rogers, meet John Norseen. Like the comic-strip hero, a 20^th century man stuck in the 25^th century, Norseen feels he’s not quite in the right time: His brain-research ideas are simply too futuristic. And he admits his current obsession seems to have been lifted from a Rogers saga. The Lockheed Martin neuroengineer hopes to turn the “electrohypnomentalophone,” a mind-reading machine invented by one of Buck’s buddies, from science fiction into science fact.

Norseen’s interest in the brain stems from a Soviet book he read in the mid-1980s, claiming that research on the mind would revolutionize the military and society at large. The former Navy pilot coined the term “BioFusion” to cover his plans to map and manipulate gray matter, leading (he hopes) to advances in medicine, national security, and entertainment. He does not do the research but sees himself as the integrator of discoveries that will make BioFusion a reality and the ultimate IW weapon for Big Brother.

BioFusion would be able to convert thoughts into computer commands, predicts Norseen, by deciphering the brain’s electrical activity. Electromagnetic pulses would trigger the release of the brain’s own neurotransmitters to fight off disease, enhance learning, or alter the mind’s visual images, creating what Norseen has dubbed “synthetic reality.”

The key is finding “brain prints.” Think of your hand touching a mirror. It leaves a fingerprint. BioFusion would reveal the fingerprints of the brain by using mathematical models. Just like you can find one person in a million through fingerprints, you can find one thought in a million.

It sounds crazy, but Uncle Sam is listening and watching. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center have all awarded small basic research contracts to Norseen, who works for Lockheed Martin’s Intelligent Systems Division. Norseen is waiting to hear if the second stage of these contracts (portions of them classified) comes through.

Norseen’s theories are grounded in current science. Mapping human brain functions is now routine. By viewing a brain scan recorded by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, scientists can tell what the person was doing at the time of the recording–say, reading or writing. Emotions from love to hate can be recognized from the brain’s electrical activity.

Thought Police

So could the murderous thoughts of a terrorist be compromised: applying neuroscience research to antiterrorism? Norseen has submitted a research-and-development plan to the Pentagon, at its request, to identify a terrorist’s mental profile. A miniaturized brain-mapping device inside an airport metal detector would screen passengers’ brain patterns against a dictionary of brain prints. Norseen predicts profiling by brain print will be in place by 2006.

A pilot could fly a plane by merely thinking, indicates Norseen. Scientists have already linked mind and machine by implanting electrodes into a paralyzed man’s brain; he can control a computer’s cursor with his mind. Norseen would like to draw on Russian brain-mimicking software and American brain-mapping breakthroughs to allow that communication to take place in a less invasive way. A modified helmet could record a pilot’s brain waves. When you say right 090 degrees, the computer would see that electrical pattern in the brain and turn the plane 090 degrees. If the pilot misheard instructions to turn 090 degrees and was thinking “080 degrees,” the helmet would detect the error, then inject the right number via electromagnetic waves.

Finally, if this research pans out, you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it. But Norseen feels he is “agnostic” on the moral ramifications, that he’s not a mad scientist—just a dedicated one. The ethics don’t concern him, but they should concern someone else.

---