### Happy Prototype Technology Developing Decades Ahead of Schedule

5/14/96

Those of you familiar with the "fiction" in the magazine "Happy" will be peeing your pants to know that the Happy Super-Computer is already in the planning stages.
For those of you unfamiliar with "Happy" can read about it at the Anathema Enterprises Web Site. Read some of the stories, such as "Interoffice Memo", and learn about a "science fiction" world where America is broken up into autonomous city-state/super-malls. Happy is a AI computer that runs the complex marketing infrastucture of Happymart - consumers are fitted with biochips that monitor buying habits and emotional reactions to commercials. Using a neural net, Happy configures the best advertising scheme for different demographics and individuals. Custom-made commercials follow customers around in electronic billboards and holographic ads.
Yeah, fiction. Whacked out, kooky, crazy science fiction. Until I read "Big Brother Goes High-Tech" by David Banisar in the latest CovertAction Quarterly. (Banisar is an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center)
Many are aware that buying habits are recorded via credit card and check transactions (and soon with E-Cash, only much easier), and stored and indexed in various marketing databases. Private credit and marketing databases have gotten so good that the FBI, IRS, and DEA have bought some of them.
Many also know of the increasing trend towards biometric security (fingerprinting at the DMV or when cashing a check, plans for retinal scans at the ATMs). Covert biometrics are being developed through facial scans. The most promising area is facial thermography, which measures thousands of points on a face for unique tempature patterns. This technique is more accurate than fingerprinting, but evidently it doesn't work when your drunk. It can be done without the subects knowledge via hidden infrared cameras.
You also may know of various tracking systems - the Lojack in cars, locators in rental cars and cellular phones, etc.
What you may not know is that THEY'RE PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER! Information from automated toll booths is entered into marketing databases to track buying habits over an area, and to compare vacation to normal buying. A.C. Neilson has patented a method to track customers in stores via facial thermography. Soon we may all be in the Neilson family.
As for the "fictional" biochip, microchips that can store everything from consumer to criminal to medical history, including digitized x-rays, are embedded in Smart Cards all over Europe. Bio-telemetry is also well established - since the 60s brainwaves and vital signs could be recorded by implants located entirely under the skin and radioed to monitoring devices. Luckily, I haven't heard of any marketing applications of this technology. Yet.
To handle all this data, there's the FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) AI computer network of hundreds of databases, and the FBI's multi-domain expert system that can cross reference arrest records, phone records, just about everything. The old problem of thousands of databases running thousands of different protocals has been solved via master programs that can assimilate and cross-reference it all. Oliver North had a system set up with FEMA to track protesters, just in case the Iran/Contra thing got too hairy and martial law had to be declared.
Add it all up, and we're a few decades closer than we imagined. Seeing how everything "fictional" we at Anathema write ends up being true, from now on we're only writing about puppy dogs and sunshine.
Hold me, Mommy.

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