It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your own house and hear your every word.
The difference is that these things used to be the domain of major government agencies rather than a hobbyist with a few hundred dollars and a poor sense of privacy.
The radar-gadget is useful if you're about to storm a house full of armed adversaries - in most other cases, you can just peek through the window or knock on the door and get much the same information.
The laser-bouncer is great for eavesdropping on people who take some effort to hide their communication - if they don't, hiding a wireless microphone or a high-capacity dictaphone is orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Surveillance-System-fo...
http://hacknmod.com/hack/how-to-long-range-laser-microphone-...
This device is used on outside walls.
http://www.range-r.com/FAQ/index.htm
The RF bands they're using apparently don't go through metal so well.
Maybe in houses with wooden walls but not in buildings with thick brick or concrete steal enhanced walls. They even recommend to press the device against the wall/floor to get the best results. This means that the device can be used to see if somebody is behind a specific wall but not just somewhere in the house a couple of rooms away.
Technology eavesdropping in new ways is a similar "forbidden knowledge". While it may not be a weapon itself, when it becomes simple and cheap enough that containing the forbidden knowledge becomes impossible[2] we face the potential disruption of some of the very foundations of society.
The question isn't if the average person will gain access to cheap and powerful eavesdropping technology, or weapons as powerful as atomic bombs, or even worse technologies that we haven't discovered yet. The question is if society will be ready for when those technologies grow and become a cheap commodity.
The general purpose computer already did this, and other electronic devices like the one mentioned in this article are experiencing this transition right now. Biotech seems to be ramping up and I suspect we will see the biotech equivalent to the "cheap personal computer" in the near-ish future. The point is we, as a species, really need to learn how to deal with these technologies now, or a future "mass shooting" might instead be an "engineered plague" or "20 kiloton bomb".
How do we deal with these threats? I don't know. But I do know trying to keep technologies bottled up as "forbidden knowledge" is at best only a delaying tactic. I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite. I personally like Roddenberry's idea of fixing most of the basic physical needs with technology; it won't fix everything, but it would probably be a good start. Unfortunately, it is easy to succumb to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude when faced with these problems. Even Feynman thought[3] the success of the Manhattan Project necessarily implied that civilization "would all be destroyed very soon anyway".
For me, I try to remember that we can't predict change[4], and worrying about things we cannot change is a waste of time and energy. Big problems grow out of small problems, so I focus on those small things that I can change. There is a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies, but we should try anyway, because the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.[5]
[1] This post is not about the 2nd. Please, there is no need to re-open that highly-charged debate.
[2] "information wants to be free", or at least hard impossible to contain.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE#t=1114
[4] See James Burke's ("Connections") non-teleological view of progress
[5] aka the speciation of humanity. I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's exploration of this type of "end result" for humanity in his novel Schismatrix[6]. (this is where my username ("pdkl95") comes from...)
> ... a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies ...
> ... the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.
I guess if you came across a hole in the dike, the small thing you can change would be to grab a jackhammer?
That said, see my profile for a description of "PDKL 95". There is a good chance I'd grab the jackhammer if it would somehow lead to a useful re-framing of the consensual hallucination.
I feel like information just sort of succumbs to entropy and it will always "try" to leak out of containment like some fleeting gas.
Is that due to human nature? Or due to the nature of information itself? Would other intelligent beings with a different psychology/ social structure also spread information like a wildfire?
I completely agree with the entropy/leaking-gas analogy, and it may suggest an explanation for why information "leaks" so easily: compared to matter, the energy of information is extremely small. The energy cost of copying or moving is trivial, and easier movement implies faster diffusion.
Disagree completely. This smells of a "busywork" solution - we know something needs to be done, but we don't know what, so we try to do something for the greater good, hoping that we can redeem ourselves and somehow be protected (or at the very least more protected) from the threat.
Incidents such as mass shootings, which you highlighted, don't tend to have roots in racism or poverty situations, but rather psychopathy; a dramatic disconnect from the wholesome core of our human nature which develops in the soul of a deeply troubled individual.
This is a problem that our society with its culture is not equipped to handle. I do tend to think that there have been societies in the past, which did have the ability to contain such problems - I don't see a murderous psychopath arising within the company of Buddha and his travelling ashram of monks.
21st century Western civilization is taking a radically different path, investing itself fully in technological progress at the expense of everything else, and will reap the fruit of this choice, good and bad.