Troféu Philip K Dick

Batendo todos os recordes anteriores de bigbroderização da sociedade mais uma vez, o Departamento de Segurança Pátria americano agora pretende investigar quem "pretende" cometer crimes.

Sério.


IMAGINE the scene. You arrive at New York's JFK airport, tired after a long flight, and trudge into line at passport control. As you wait, a battery of lasers, cameras, eye trackers and microphones begin secretly compiling a dossier of information about your body.

The computer that is processing the data from these hidden sensors is not searching for explosives, knives, guns or contraband. Instead, it is working on a much tougher problem: whether you are thinking about committing a terrorist act, either imminently, or at sometime during your stay in the US. If the computer decides that might be your intention, you will be led off for interview with security officers.

The equipment could also screen passengers as they wait to have their bags checked before boarding, in an attempt to predict when someone is planning to bomb or hijack a plane.

It sounds far-fetched, but this is the aim of Project Hostile Intent (PHI), the latest anti-terrorism idea from the US Department of Homeland Security. According to DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie, the DHS wants to develop systems that can analyse behaviour remotely to predict which of the 400 million people who enter the US every year have 'current or future hostile intentions'.

PHI aims to identify facial expressions, gait, blood pressure, pulse and perspiration rates that are characteristic of hostility or the desire to deceive. Then the idea is to develop "real-time, culturally independent, non-invasive sensors" and software that can detect those behaviours, says Orluskie. The DHS's Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) suggests that these sensors could include heart rate and breathing sensors, infrared light, laser, video, audio and eye tracking.

PHI got quietly under way on 9 July, when HSARPA issued a "request for information" in which it asked security companies and US government labs to suggest technologies that could be used to achieve the project's aims. It hopes to test them at a handful of airports, borders and ports as early as 2010 and to deploy the system at all points of entry to the US by 2012.

Tá, você tá falando de um povo que, nos últimos cinquenta anos, inventou o foguete nuclear (não precisa nem de bomba na ponta, a radiação vai matar tudo em volta de onde ele cair. E no caminho), o gás gay (porque, obviamente, nunca ouviram falar no batalhão sagrado de Tebas), o projeto Hudson ("vamos criar um lago de um milhão de quilômetros quadrados na Amazônia porque...um...bem...) e outras "genialidades." Mesmo assim, o Minority Report de segunda bate todos, porque junta insanidade e distopia.