In a world of dangerous threats, how can individuals be protected? Are the top down approachs to security by the Department of Defense and Homeland Security up to this challenge? Is it a correct assumption that security from terrorism and other attacks will require the loss of privacy by individuals and private organizations? These are some of the questions Christine Peterson, cofounder of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, raises in this speech from the 2007 Singularity Summit.

Peterson explores the challenges of Artificial General Intelligence and questions the accepted approaches. She suggests that the open source software experience may offer a new approach. She argues that we use an open source approach to inspire us to look for ways to transfer the advantages of that process to the physical world. She defends this belief by pointing out how successful the open source community has been at correcting security vulnerabilities.

By extending the principles of open source into the physical world, Peterson wants to make physical security "bottom-up", decentralized, collaborative, and transparent. Peterson presents bottom-up sousveillance, "watching from below," as a comprehensive, ubiquitous data collection and publication for all to view. In this new approach, a citizen-controlled, privacy-oriented, verifiably limited open source approach can satisfy the security challenges of the future.