The hidden revolution

What you don't see will need careful watching

MACHINES, buildings, fields and human bodies have a lot to say, if only they are given a chance to talk. "The previous information revolution was IT, which was basically: take all the paper and turn it digital to share. What we provide [now] is a bridge to the physical world," says Joy Weiss, the boss of Dust Networks, which makes wireless chips.

Yet dealing with lots of wireless gadgets everywhere is an unpractised art. Security must be assured and privacy protected. All those radio waves raise health worries. There may not be enough radio spectrum to go around as demand grows. And in the longer term disparate systems may converge and become interconnected, bringing up a whole host of new questions.

What is already clear is that the infrastructure required to support wireless communications will have to be massive. Already, tens of billions of e-mails, mobile text messages and instant messages are being sent through the world's public networks each day, not to mention quasi-closed networks used by stock exchanges, flight-reservation systems and the like. Each CDMA mobile phone communicates with a cell tower 800 times a second just for its power management.

VeriSign, which manages networks such as the internet's address system, the global RFID registry and mobile text messages, is spending $200m-300m on its system to handle a peak load of 4 trillion internet-address queries a day by 2010. Cyber-attacks are expected to grow at a rate of 50% a year. The design of the new systems will be critical and the penalties for failure severe. For example, faulty RFID infrastructure in the initial stages of the Iraq war in 2003 resulted in supplies to the value of $1.2 billion being lost during transport, according to the US General Accounting Office. Projects to embed robust RFID chips into passports and national ID cards around the world are beset with delays.

The issue is trickier than many people appreciate. As wireless systems become common in homes, businesses and public spaces, says Lee McKnight of Syracuse University and the founder of Wireless Grids Corp, they will eventually integrate and work together on the fly, in the same way that today a property website might choose to overlay Google maps on its listings. Moreover, the streams of data from devices and sensors are different in kind from what most people are used to: the information is "probabilistic" rather than definitive, explains Martin Illsley of Accenture. And the systems are vulnerable to being hacked into.

The way we look at privacy protection will need to be overhauled. Today it works like a minuet, with a defined set of partners and parameters, says Elliot Maxwell, a technology-policy guru and former official at America's commerce department. But M2M and sensor networks change the tune: the systems are more decentralised and interwoven. Who keeps an audit trail? How are the data verified? Who gives consent to whom? Today's privacy rules presume a relationship between citizen and government or consumer and company. But the way in which information will be generated and shared may involve so many parties that the minuet will turn into a punk rock concert.

The issues feel new because the technology is only just beginning to be deployed. Where it is already in use, with RFID chips, it has generated controversy. American Express has patented a technique to track people in public places based on the RFID tags in their clothing and products they carry, but has agreed not to use it without disclosing the fact, after pressure from privacy advocates. Last year a Wisconsin legislator proposed a law to ban any mandatory microchip implants in humans (although nothing of the kind exists as yet), or embedding a chip in a person without the recipient's knowledge. The European Commission is set to issue guidelines on privacy and security standards for RFID technology later this year.

Silent chips

"The 'silence of the chips' must be preserved as a fundamental right of citizens," says Bernard Benhamou of the Institute of Political Science in Paris, who was a member of the French delegation at UN meetings on internet governance in 2003-06. Mobile phones, he believes, should be able to pick up the presence of sensors. People should be able to read basic RFID tags--and destroy them too to preserve their privacy. Such rights, he says, will become more important as wireless technologies become small enough to be invisible.

Yet the technology cuts both ways. Prisons in America are experimenting with bracelets that have wireless chips embedded in them to keep track of inmates. It sounds Big Brotherish, but prison officials say that violence among prisoners has decreased. Guards are also tagged, so prisoners may feel safer from abuse.

A 2004 report for the European Parliament on the effects of new wireless technologies on health and the environment argued for the "precautionary principle": holding back until any adverse effects have become clear. But in practice that is hard to do. The report recommended that technology products be sold with factual labels, rather like processed foods, so consumers will know how much radiation they emit, how much energy they use and so on. The report did not cover privacy, but there should probably be disclosure of the presence of wireless systems too.

Another possibility is to separate the data. Adam Greenfield, in his book "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing", published last year, makes an impassioned plea for "seamfulness". Whereas the computer industry strives to make things as "seamless" (that is, integrated) as possible, he advocates keeping some networks and data apart.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government has come up with a more innovative proposal: requiring information to be deleted over time. He describes this as a legal and technical version of human forgetting. Today's computer systems do not do that; tomorrow we may wish they did.

We are in the early stages of the creation of a new industry, reminiscent of computing in the early 1970s when companies began to adopt it in earnest. There was plenty of resistance. The systems were difficult to operate and seemed to be set up for nerds. The economic benefits were questioned. There were privacy and regulatory worries. Yet in time the rough edges were smoothed and everybody benefited.

Technology rarely evolves in the way that people think it will. When Marconi invented his wireless telegraph, he never imagined broadcast radio. A decade earlier Heinrich Hertz had famously declared: "I do not think that the wireless waves that I have discovered will have any practical application." To the men at Bell Labs in 1947 the transistor was simply an efficient replacement for vacuum tubes; they had no inkling of its use in computers. Today these technologies are omnipresent: televisions in every home; computers in every office; phones in every pocket; radio towers looming overhead.

What is different about new wireless communications is that people will barely notice them. Machines will talk to machines without human intervention. But humans will nevertheless be laying the foundation of a new infrastructure which, like the electrical power grid, will become a platform for subsequent innovation. There is no saying how it will be used other than that it will surprise us.