Best regards

Jim Clayton

Total surveillance comes about as an aggregation of tools and technologies, not any one particular system. While where I go and what I do from the moment I leave my front door to the moment I return to it isn’t secret, it’s generally my private business and not anyone else’s. Some people may catch glimpses of it, such as bumping into friends and acquaintances in the street. But that’s a different thing from having someone follow you around all day, obsessively cataloguing your movements and activities and making them available for all the world, in real time, and forever. Street View is essentially a prototype of such a system.

It is the ubiquity and aggregation of digital surveillance that is qualitatively different from the pre-internet age where it was simply not possible to record, store and globally publish everyone’s activities. Google’s stated mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. I note that they make no distinction between information that traditionally has been considered private from that which has been traditionally public.