Apathy Sketchpad

picture credit: ssoosay

Advances in technology are already leading to the development of robots that mimic human appearance as well as movement. And security experts fear terror groups could diguise them as innocent pedestrians in future plots.

The key word here, I think, is ‘future’. I’m thinking maybe… forty years hence? I mean, maybe mankind will be able to create a realistic replica human in the next decade, but not at a price some wingnut religious fundamentalist would be able to afford. Certainly it won’t be cheaper or easier than radicalising a disillusioned student any time even remotely soon.

The call [for ideas for anti-terrorism gadgets] is part of a new terrorism science and technology strategy and echoes the fictional boffin “Q”, made famous in the James Bond stories.

Yes, thankyou. Just report the news and I’ll relate it to my experience of popular culture myself. Further, I hypothesise that any article that uses the word ‘boffin’ is a load of shit. You don’t even need a clever idea to spot an android posing as a human. A cheap (by then) thermal camera will do it, I should think. A weighing scale will probably suffice. Analyse its gait. Fire random EM pulses about the place.

Millions of pounds could be available to fund the right product and one idea that has already found success is a maritime “stinger” able to stop a terrorist speedboat.

Terrorists haven’t got speedboats. They’ve got flour and vegetable oil. They’ve got rucksacks and bus passes. They dig up corpses and bomb cars. They use mobiles and email and trains, just like everyone else. The only terrorists who have speedboats are the fictional ones made famous in the James Bond films. People with easy access to speedboats wouldn’t bomb in such crude ways even if they wanted to — which they wouldn’t because people who’ve got speedboats tend to be pretty chuffed with the status quo just the way it is, thankyou very much.

Some of them have missiles, mind, so the problem of ‘how to blow something up without being there’ isn’t one they can’t solve already.

Experts with ideas to counter future threats are urged to get in contact.

Okay. I have some ideas.

First, I thought that we could counter the clear and present danger posed by terrorist androids posing as humans by the invention of the Android Detection Kit. It’s small and fits in a handbag, and although it looks like one of those little flexible magnets people used to use to distinguish aluminium cans from steel ones, with the writing crossed out and ‘android detector’ written in, it is in fact a highly technical robosensor unit.

Next, we should definitely develop some kind of teleport jamming field, because the danger that a terrorist might simply beam a bomb into the middle of a shopping centre or a train station is– well, not a train station, obviously, because we’d all be teleporting around the place instead, but maybe the car park outside the teleport shop.

Although I suppose they’d just teleport your teleport to you. Never mind.

Lastly, I think releasing a gaseous form of Carex into the environment would help. It would be designed to work on humans rather than bacteria, and would kill the bad humans while promoting the growth of good humans, such as homo immunitas.

BBC News tells me that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said in a statement (how else does one say things?) that it would be impossible to close the thoroughly illegal and indefensible prison at Guantánamo Bay because of

that irreducible 70 or 80 [prisoners] who you cannot let loose but will not be charged and will not be sent home.

…

“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home.”

…

Yet these 50 to 70 prisoners could not be charged either, he said. This is presumably because there is not enough or no evidence against them.

If there’s no evidence against them, let them go. If their home countries won’t take them, let them go in America — if you didn’t want them in your country, you shouldn’t have dragged them there in handcuffs (see later). If there’s evidence, charge them. That’s how legal systems work in all countries except for fascist dictatorships.

And maybe some of them will go on to commit acts of terrorism after you release them. Well, that’s the risk you take, but the fact is you’re not fighting individuals. You’re not even fighting an organisation. You’re fighting an ideology: extremist Islam. The individuals don’t matter — keep one in prison and another will attack you, and he’ll be angrier. You don’t fight AIDS by killing the HIV-positive.

The aim of extreme Islam is to turn the world into a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. You don’t respond to that by becoming a fundamentalist Christian dictatorship as the Republicans would seem to. If you don’t respect the fundamental human rights of your prisoners — against whom you can’t even construct a case — then you’re no better than the terrorists: you think you can get away with this stuff because you’re the Goodies and they’re the Baddies but to torture the enemy and imprison them indefinitely without trial is to lose sight of why you’re the Goodies. Western civilisation is better than fundamentalist theocracy purely because it’s democratic and transparent. It’s more important to society that justice is seen to be done than that justice is done. The government must remain answerable to the people, and the Bush administration seems to believe it is above them. It abuses their rights, lies to them, and does so in secret — strictly, of course, Guantánamo Bay is in Cuba, where US laws do not apply. The Bush administration rather pathetically thought that people would be placated by this. The contempt they show for their citizens here is shocking: they think that although the people should have to live according to the law (including people in other countries if they might have some oil handy), the government should be free to get around these laws in whatever way they please. In fact, the government are the people who it is most important that the law applies to — there’s very little else to keep them in check.

If you respond to fundamentalist Islamists with no respect for human rights by becoming fundamentalist Christians with no respect for human rights then the terrorists lose, but so do you and so does everybody else.

You’re just different Baddies.

The following things are not terrorism:

• Drawing a cartoon.
• Making a level for Counterstrike.
• Insulting the Pope.

If they are, boy am I in trouble. (Although I’m more the 21/7 type of videogame level maker. My attempts never work properly.)

Now can everyone shut up about imaginary terrorists? We have enough trouble with the real ones.

From Thursday’s Times:

George Bush admitted yesterday for the first time that terror suspects had been held in secret CIA prisons outside US borders, saying that they were now being transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Oh, well that’s alright, then, isn’t it?