"Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers' chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society." Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State

I thought no more about biotelemetrics. The convenor of IEC 25/ WG 5, Dr. Paul Gerome, sent me hundreds of megabytes, thousands of pages of electronic text, and a portfolio of images, movies and Powerpoint files from the ITU, ISO and IEC. I am a professional rhetorician of science and technology, so I looked them over... I was impressed by the range of expertise the delegates - physicists, and engineers mostly - had brought to bear on the problem. Rather than treating this spectre of an intensified control society as a site for carefully constructed critique (or hand wringing worry), IEC experts treated the emergence of biotelemetric technologies as a practical multidisciplinary problem in securing the "privacy sphere" of human beings, the imaginary one meter sphere surrounding human "wetware" sampled from Da Vinci's vision of the human body. While I am more than skeptical of technical "solutions" to political problems, the documents did suggest that any biotelemetric system would operate best as a highly distributed system maintained by "the commons" rather than subject to the control of a state. It also suggested that such a commons required a protocol if it were to come into being.

Informational security analyst Bruce Schneier articulated the conditions necessary to a robust biotelemetrics system back in 1999:

A worthwhile biotelemetrics system, then, requires both unique information and spatial and temporal "watermarks", numerous clues to the location and time of the biotelemetric signature. In \"reputation\" systems such those evolved by online marketplace Ebay, such watermarks are composed through the feedback of a community of buyers and sellers, rather than any centralized authority. While Ebay does periodically intervene in the system, the vast majority of transactions involve no central authority whatsoever. Gnucleus, an open source software for peer to peer networks, also acts as a mapping agent, and provides us with a nice snapshot of a highly distributed network devoid of a center and hence difficult to attack:

(click here for a larger image)

The structural need of biometrics for geographical and temporal information would also seem most compatible with a highly distributed ( and therefore difficult to hack) system of evaluation, a Global Positioning System of human identity emerging not from the state but from the digital crowd. At first blush, then, workable biotelemetric technologies would seem to undermine centralized state power rather than amplifying it. Perhaps in biotelemetrics we will see a recapitulation and confirmation of anthropologist Pierre Clastres' notion that society is continually in flight from the state. Rather than the highly evolved destiny of any organized gathering of human beings, the state, in this view, "piggy-backs" on the commons or "society".

That the most effective biotelemetric system is likely to be "peer to peer" - composed entirely of the interactions between members of a community without hierarchy but rich in reputation information - does not suggest that its effects could be any less malevolent than the centralized gaze of a Big Brother state. Some of the most active participants of the Technical Committee, I learned, came from former Warsaw Pact countries more than alert to the dangers of living under "totality", the Czech delegate's apt translation for a statist control society whose corporate/state analog I and many other civil libertarians contest. I read through different versions of the IEC and ITU technical documents and the correspondence linked to them. After consulting with friends working for organizations devoted to civil and cognitive liberties, mobius decided in favor of an ethics of community formation and participation. Recalling my experiences with early genomics (1991-1994) mobius decided that it was only by understanding both the scientific and cultural contexts affecting technological change that one could be truly response-able to the political and technical potentials of ubiquitous biotelemetrics.

My work at first consisted almost entirely of practice in technical communication. With internet telephony and file sharing programs, I helped delegates work through and organize technical documents that simultaneously address the quantitative aspects of standards and the wide range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives of the experts working on the protocols. To be honest, my presence was welcomed as (1) a participating member from the US, whose "Buy-in" is sought by IEC committees and (2) an expert in written English and a native speaker of Californian... After debugging a particularly complex diagram representing the human sensorium, the Convenor of the Technical Committee suggested that I should become the new US Delegate to the IEC. Astonished, I again decided in favor of an ethics of participation.

The Going Gets Wyrd - An interruption from an Involved Observer, told in the Pink Light