surveillance society

Trevor Paglen, Artist/Photographer

"I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored," Paglen says, "and when people understand that they are constantly monitored they are more conformist, they are less willing to take up controversial positions, and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.

"The second reason is that mass surveillance creates a dramatic power imbalance between citizens and government. In a democracy the citizens are supposed to have all the power and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power and citizens have very little. In a democratic society you should have a state with maximum transparency and maximum civil liberties for citizens. But in a surveillance state the exact opposite is true."

"Secrecy," Paglen says, "is a way of doing things, of trying to organise human activities, and it has political, economic, legal, cultural aspects. It is a way of trying to do things whose goal is invisibility, silence, obscurity."

http://www.paglen.com