I have been thinking about this for quite some time, and now I ran across this morsel… what are we going to do about this?
“In the future, intelligence services might use the loT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper said (PDF), according to his prepared testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”
Internet of Things to be used as spy tool by governments: US intel chief
Related must-read: Bruce Schneier on the IoT as the World's biggest Robot
His best morsels (highlights by me)
“The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives….Sensors will collect environmental data from all over the world. The other part will be actuators. They'll affect our environment. Our smart thermostats aren't collecting information about ambient temperature and who's in the room for nothing; they set the temperature accordingly. The Internet now senses, thinks, and acts. We're building a world-sized robot, and we don't even realize it. I've started calling this robot the World-Sized Web.
By and large, the WSW will be a benign robot. It will collect data and do things in our interests; that's why we're building it. But it will change our society in ways we can't predict, some of them good and some of them bad. It will maximize profits for the people who control the components. It will enable totalitarian governments. It will empower criminals and hackers in new and different ways. It will cause power balances to shift and societies to change. These changes are inherently unpredictable, because they're based on the emergent properties of these new technologies interacting with each other, us, and the world. In general, it's easy to predict technological changes due to scientific advances, but much harder to predict social changes due to those technological changes.
We need to create agency, a Department of Technology Policy, that can deal with the WSW in all its complexities. It needs the power to aggregate expertise and advice other agencies, and probably the authority to regulate when appropriate”
