Our readers might have read David Brin’s Transparent Society, or our recent entries on sousveillance and the participatory panopticon.
Philippe Van Nedervelde has systematized some of these insights into what should be a more generalized security concept -a new security doctrine, in fact- which might have frightening aspects for some, but which is surely in the cards, technologically speaking: a Multi-laterally Assured Pervasive Permanent Surveillance (MAPPS). MAPPS is explicitly based on the P2P principle, which Philippe mnemonically coined as the 4 E’s: Everybody has Eyes & Ears Everywhere.
The acronym refers to and aims to supplant the Cold War era doctrine of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) with a doctrine which aims to act as an effective deterrent of large-scale armed conflict. The MAPPS\ndoctrine aims to do so not by virtue of a bi-lateral virtual parity of nuclear destructive capability as with M.A.D. in the Cold War era, but by a multi-lateral virtual parity of pervasive and permanent informational/intelligence capability realized by means of the anticipated development of extremely fine-grained intelligence gathering capability presumed to be in the form of nanotech-based so-called “Smart Dust” localizers. (See AetherWire, Inc. ,Dust Networks, Inc. and Panoptic Systems, Inc..
In order to make the technology available to all, rather than proprietary, he also proposes to develop a global citizen’s version of such technology as an open source, P2P community project. His working title for the project is the People’s P2P Panopticon, which is to be Earth’s citizens’ anti-armed-conflict Smart Dust Open sousveillance transparency initiative.
His take seems to be that since pervasive, permanent transparency is all but inevitable, then we should insure that it is indeed reciprocal and multi-lateral. For indeed, uni-lateral or oligo-lateral development and deployment of such a capability would pose grave risks for abuses by means of what would effectively be the ultimate Big Brother system.
Much of this is already happening online, and in my own manuscript I have coined the term of ‘Participation Capture‘. Since it seems such a likely development, and the almost natural result of the possibilities inherent in the technology, it is obligatory to think through such proposals and see how they can be applied for good. One image that can take it away from any misuse by the military-industrial complex is to think of it as an application of non-violent civil defense, a distribution of the means of control in the broad population.
Philippe recently gave the opening address to the world’s first conference on Military Nanotechnology held in London last October, where his presentation made the first public mention of his new MAPPS doctrine concept.
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