Security Applications for Converging Technologies

Abstract

The impact of converging technologies on legal practice and criminology is being investigated in a forward looking study intended for practitioners and policy makers in the field of legislation, crime prevention, and law enforcement. This report consists of three parts. The first part describes the state of the art and future expectations on nano-, bio-, ICT and cognitive science and technology, as well as their convergence. The second part describes the (future) applicability of converging technologies to our application domain, in particular in three cases. This part ends with scenarios that are used as a means to ‘visualize’ the developments and an input for the impact analysis. In the third part the scenarios are analysed on their ethical, legal and social implications. This part describes the major social and normative trends that are observed. CONTENT: 1. Introduction 2. Nanotechnology 3. Biotechnology 4. Information technology 5. Cognitive sciences 6. NBIC convergence 7. Relevance of converging technologies for security applications 8. Scenarios for the application of converging technologies in the security sector 9. Major trends and social and normative impact assessment 10. Conclusions 11. Addendum: The trends and the normative framework of the Dutch criminal law