Americans may increasingly wonder whether NSA agents are scouring their meta-data, reading their personal emails, and the like. On the US-Mexican border no imagination is necessary.
The internet’s cookie monsters are harvesting your secrets. A £90bn industry is going unregulated and unchecked, gathering seemingly unrelated information for trade and profit.
How Big Data and the Internet of Things means the surveillance of everything. There’s simply no way to forecast how these immense powers - disproportionately accumulating in the hands of corporations seeking financial advantage and governments craving ever more control - will be used.
Mass surveillance does not follow the vertical logic of pure state surveillance as imagined by Orwell. Rather, it is diagonal – building on the information we voluntarily disclose to engage in our own "surveillance" of online friends. This makes it much more perverse.
As the traditional role of the commons is lost to proprietary, securitised technology and authoritarian control, could designed conflict territories provide a radically different social platform where agonistic conflict could play out?
With focus on the government's grip over surveillance, the public debate over privacy has ignored citizen-led data initiatives to regain power in the digital age - and the war being waged against them.
We scrutinize the state for its Orwellian ambitions, but not the structures that render them feasible. Privacy debates have engaged with issues of political power and sensationalist culture, with little attention paid to the third factor – the economic context.
In India, surveillance is on the rise by the state to tackle crime and terrorism, and private companies are eager to meet the demand.
