I want to take a brief break from the sturm und drang about South and its version of 2032 to show you a couple of the more interesting settings used in Doha 12. I’d like to start with Temple Emanu-El on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Emanu-El houses the first Reform…
In South’s version of 2032, our hero Luis helps American Muslims go south across the border into the relative safety of civil war-wracked Mexico to escape from the detention camps that have swallowed 430,000 of their co-religionists. How did this happen? How could it happen? It has before. Unless you’ve…
In the last installment, I talked about some of the influences on fashion design in South’s version of 2032. Now I’ll look at the clothes themselves. In general, I intend to avoid the usual future-styles tropes: jumpsuits (hot and impractical for everyday wear), metallic fabrics, unisex smocks, government-issued uniforms, and…
Enough with the heavy stuff about surveillance and putting the Fourth Amendment through the shredder. Now I’m going to try something truly foolish: figure out what people will be wearing in May 2032 in the Southern California of South. This is foolish because it’s hard enough to predict what will…
Apropos of my four-part series on surveillance in 2032 America comes this, from Gizmag.com: Using an off-the-shelf Emotiv BCI costing only a few hundred dollars, the team has shown that it’s possible to “hack” a human brain and pull things like bank details straight out of your skull. For more…
I’ve entered the home stretch on South — the last sequence in the final act — and want to keep writing while I’m on a roll. It may be a few days before I post again. If you don’t use RSS and want to know when the next epistle comes…
In Part 1, I outlined the legal foundations of the surveillance state in 2032. In parts 2a and 2b, I listed some of the capabilities law enforcement and intelligence agencies will have to watch where people go and what they do, say or write. So now that you’re all paranoid…
In Doha 12, Hezbollah launches its effort to eliminate the Doha 12 (including Our Heroes) as part of their worldwide publicity/propaganda campaign. Hezbollah is one of the most sophisticated users of media, image and messaging in the terrorist world, with their own newspapers and satellite TV channel. But a theme…
Last time, I reviewed some (but certainly not all) of the surveillance tools available today to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This time, I’ll talk about a few of the new wrinkles that have appeared in the 2032 of South. These aren’t sci-fi whizbangs; they already exist, just aren’t deployed…
In Part 1, I reviewed the legal state-of-play enabling the surveillance state in South’s 2032 (disturbingly similar to today’s conditions). In this installment and the next, I’ll talk about some of the tools law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have available to monitor people’s activity and communications. Part 3 will talk about…