Commissar of Cloaking

We formally offer to become the Commissar of Cloaking for a grateful world should this Startling New Technology pan out.

High-tech cloaking machines could one day render very small objects nearly invisible and perhaps improve military stealth technology, scientists said Monday.

The idea is straight out of science fiction -- cloaking technology made Romulan spaceships disappear in Star Trek. A humbler version of the device could become a reality, according to Nader Engheta and Andrea Alu of the University of Pennsylvania.
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The proposal involves using plasmons -- tiny electronic excitations on the surfaces of some metals -- to cancel out the visible light or other radiation coming from an object.

"A proper design … may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross-section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer," Nader and Alu write in a scientific paper that was made available to the public Feb. 14.
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The idea is in an infant stage but appears not to violate any laws of physics, according to an article Monday in news@nature.com, an online companion to the journal Nature, which provided advance copies of the story to reporters.

"The concept is an interesting one, with several important potential applications," John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College in London in the UK, told the publication. "It could find uses in stealth technology and camouflage."

Excuse us, but that is chicken feed. Cloaking devices offer more than mere military applications. Think of the entertainment potential! No longer do you merely wish you could be that "fly on the wall."

Of course such technology could be abused, thus a Commissar of Cloaking would be needed to determine who gets to use it and who doesn't.

That would be our job. Naturally, we'd have to have a working model for research on those thorny issues of when cloaking is and is not appropriate. We've already got some good ideas, however. Some people are already invisible on this planet. They do not need to be cloaked. They need to be encouraged to come out of the shadows and be counted.

Others are far too visible already. These people -- you know who they are -- we would order involuntarily cloaked and we would hold the key to their eventual uncloaking when the world had had its proper rest. We're thinking certain Hollywood celebs, the Clintons, Beyonce, Howard Dean (enough already), Bill O'Reilly (yeah, him too). Oh, the list is a long one and the workload for a Commissar of Cloaking would be heavy, so the pay must be commeasurate.

Let us not wait until cloaking, like cloning, becomes a huge ethical issue. Put us in charge now, and we will make sure that this new technology is used only for good and not evil.