Mass Surveillance, Alive and Kicking
Mass surveillance. Back in the 20th century, it was something we associated with the communist regimes of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. After their collapse, some of those countries threw open the books, writes Neal Ascherson: “For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe.” And the portrait people see of themselves is scary: “These portraits may be the result of years of painstaking, insanely minute watching and eavesdropping by one or several security teams. Almost always, much of their detail comes from informers. Some informers won’t be identifiable. Some may be fictional, invented by idle security officers bumping up their expenses. But some will turn out to be the reader’s intimately trusted friends or lovers.” The amount of information gathered, the sheer “omnipresence of this invisible army of watchers a...