Most people are probably uncomfortable with the fact that their every
activity can be monitored and logged with unerring precision. I'm no exception.
However, I feel that the issue of privacy being compromised at the expense of
security has been somewhat overhyped by detractors. If my vote were to count, I
would choose security over privacy. A world that utilises pervasive technology
to combat terrorism and other malicious activities which take away lives and
cause hurt indiscriminately is, in my opinion, a more livable place than one in
which we have maximum privacy and anonymity but live in constant fear of being
blown to bits by fanatics.
Technology that allows seeing through walls serves two primary purposes when it
comes to increasing overall security in daily life. Firstly, the deterrence
factor cannot be overstated. Knowing that a high percentage of their unethical
activities can be easily witnessed by other people would likely reduce the
speed of reprobates carrying out such plans. With sufficient ubiquity, this
technology can cut down the situational advantage that such people currently
possess.
The second purpose pertains to actual security enforcement. This technology
would allow enforcement agents to better conduct counter-terrorist and related
activities. For example, based on intelligence reports, they would be able to
quietly perform scans of areas that that have been marked as high-risk zones.
Results from these scans can then be processed visually or electronically to
quickly support crack-down operations.
Having said all these though, it is perhaps inevitable in time to come that the
advent of this technology results in the progression of peer technology such as
scan-blocking and scan-muddling. It is thus likely that this will result in a
low-privacy and low-security world subsequently in which common folk are
subject to pervasive and intrusive identity scans while bad-hats employ
counter-technology to slip through such scans.
The bottomline is that the extent of technology does not matter more than how
it is applied. The latter in turn depends on the degree of progression of human
ethics and actualisation of the human spirit. A world in which technology and
human ethics progress at disproportionate rates teeters on the edge of
destruction.
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