Open source-style security for the physical world

From Foresight Vision Weekend 2007: The Unconference

Preparing for Bizarreness: Open source-style security for the physical world

Christine L. Peterson

Attempting to take action now to get ready for a world with increasingly decentralized and powerful threats is a highly daunting task. Nevertheless it is worth considering our options, especially any that are useful in the nearer term. We can ask: In a world of decentralized physical threats — including bioweapons today and nanotech weapons someday — how can individuals be protected?

The open source software experience inspires us to look for ways to transfer the advantages of that process to the physical world. Open source has been particularly speedy at correction of security vulnerabilities – precisely the kind of vulnerabilities we will need to guard against in a world of powerful, decentralized technologies able to be used for coercion. We can begin now to extend the principles of open source into the physical world: we can start to make physical security "bottom-up", decentralized, collaborative, and transparent.

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