BCI and Surveillance

I’ve written about Brain Computer Interface (BCI) previously but was recently inspired to revisit it based on Pablo Torres Finds Out episode about BrainCo.

In the episode they discuss dystopian mind reading applications for BCI — where a government can read peoples’ private thoughts.

That made me think, what will the future defenses be for this type of snooping. Just as a VPN can be used to obscure an IP address, how might people obscure their brain waves.

The first and obvious solution would be to insulate the brain from being read *puts on literal tin foil hat*.

An alternative and more interesting approach would be short term brain washing. Perhaps in the future, there will be a method in which you can temporarily change or silence your inner beliefs and therefore thoughts for a time-boxed or geo-fenced period, after which, your base beliefs and thoughts reemerge.

So imagine the brain wave surveillance is only active in the town square. Whenever you pass through the town square, you temporarily scramble your brain waves to become non-interesting to the surveillance system.