Christine Peterson is a founder and Vice-President of Foresight Institute, and focuses effort on educating the public on nanotechnology issues.  In this emotionally-charged presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Ms. Peterson lays out the potential privacy concerns of using nanotechnology and closed-source software to monitor for a future terrorist attack.

Ms. Peterson describes the three stages of nanotechnology, and talks about how it can be used currently to monitor for hundreds of thousands of substances, which has numerous potential applications in the physical security world.  The U.S. Federal Government tends to focus on increased surveillance as a means to prevent a future attack; however, she believes that using bottom-up, open source principles will prevent privacy violations from occurring.