Derek interviewed journalist and researcher, Arthur Holland Michel, after the publication of Michel's 2019 book, Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All. When reading Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger, Derek was struck by Klein's insight that the Right has picked up issues the Left has abandoned—such as surveillance technology. And he recalled this interview with Michel, who reports on some of the scariest surveillance tech in history.
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Show Notes
The surveillance technology that will watch us all, all the time
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And regarding that last topic, something that should concern everyone, privacy.
I'm Derek Barris.
A reminder that we're on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and that you can access all of our episodes ad-free, and gain access to our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
Now, for today's deep cut.
Want to think back to Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger, which I know we've talked about a lot, but when I was reading it, she discusses how the right has picked up on issues that the left has abandoned.
And one of those is surveillance technology.
So Klein repeatedly writes about how she saw jokes during the pandemic about how anti-vaxxers were claiming that tracking microchips were being placed in vaccines, and people were laughing because we walk around with our cell phones in our pockets all day.
And yeah, that point isn't wrong, but it also ignores the fact that surveillance technology is growing more powerful by the day, and Klein is right that many liberals generally ignore this fact.
So back when I was reading that book in August, I was reminded of an interview that I conducted in 2019 with the journalist and researcher Arthur Holland Michel.
And this was after the publication of his book, Eyes in the Sky, The Secret Rise of Gorgon's Stare and How It Will Watch Us All.
Now one of my earliest memories in life was watching Clash of the Titans at a drive-in movie theater.
I think I was like four years old.
I was in a parking lot across the street and seeing Medusa, the Gorgon, on the screen.
It gave me nightmares for years afterwards.
After you hear this interview, you might have nightmares on your own.
So Gorgon Stare refers to a camera-enabled drone called Argus, A-R-G-U-S, that can track individuals over a 50-square-kilometer radius from over 20,000 feet in the sky.
So here's how Michel writes about it in his book.
In its final form, Argus had 1,854,296,064 pixels, enough imaging power to spot an object 6 inches
wide from an altitude of 25,000 feet in a frame twice the width of Manhattan.
So this is a little more powerful than your cell phone camera, I'll say that.
You might want to re-listen to that sentence if you want to try to understand the power of what we're talking about here.
Now, this thing, Argus, has been in use by police forces in America since before Michelle wrote the book in 2019.
I believe Baltimore was one of the cities that was testing this out then.
So, basically, think of it this way.
There's a drone that none of us can actually see.
It's over five miles in the sky, and it can read your license plate without a problem.
Now, I'm not even sure how far the tech has evolved since I talked to Arthur, but since this interview was on my old podcast, Earthrise, I thought it was a good idea to bring it back in the age of rapidly advancing AI that we're currently living in.
And yeah, I know open AI is a shitshow right now if you've been following that fiasco at all.
But there's also a lot of talk happening in tech spaces around governance and AI protocols.
And the general feeling by some tech journalists is that privacy issues amount to little more than empty pledges on these companies' websites.
And that's really, really troublesome.
Because surveillance and privacy issues are not left or right.
And none of us are in a position to shrug them off.
So, listening to this interview again, I'm going to be following up on the topic next year as we approach the elections here in America.
But for now, here's my interview with Arthur Holland-Michel, and if anything, his message
is only more urgent right now than when we recorded over four years ago, which is saying quite a lot.
So I'm wondering, when did you first decide to become a horror writer?
Well, that's a good question.
I kind of fell into it when I was a student at Bard College.
I had this crazy idea to start a research institute that would study drones in all their many forms.
And that project really took on a life of its own.
Soon after we started it and by the time I graduated in May of 2013 we had enough traction that I started working for the college right away and if you study drones you get to think about and look at a whole range of very nightmarish technologies and the aerial surveillance technologies that the book looks at in One of the most fascinating aspects is that you framed the entire book around the movie Enemy of the State because a lot of this technology originated from that and taking basically fiction into reality.
Why did you decide to frame the book around that and how true to life do you think that movie was to what is emerging in this technology?
Well, it's kind of incredible.
In the book, I reveal for the first time that this technology was directly inspired by the movie Enemy of the State.
What's amazing, though, is that before my book came out, the movie was often And everyone just assumed that that resemblance was purely coincidental.
The movie served as the closest visual reference to what this technology looks like, what it does, and how it can be used and indeed abused.
And so when I discovered that that coincidence was not at all coincidental, I really was blown away.
I also felt like the movie was important because it not only serves as inspiration for the technology itself, but it also serves as a really powerful cautionary tale about what happens when these kinds of technologies are abused.
And in fact, the movie was incredibly ahead Not only in the technologies that it imagined might be possible in the near future, but also in terms of the kind of concerns that would arise when those technologies exist, and indeed how those technologies could be abused.
The central premise of the movie being that if you have really powerful surveillance technologies, The arms of government that wish to abuse those technologies become all the more powerful.
And those abuses become all the more easy and perhaps even all the more tempting for those who might otherwise not break the law.
And so that is a really useful, I guess, allegory for what is happening now.
We have these technologies that are eminently abusable.
Really just with a flick of a switch and in the absence of proper controls, which we do not have right now.
You bring up an important point there.
And in your book, you write that everyone you talk to who's involved in this technology thinks that they're doing it for good reason.
And I don't doubt that.
It seems from your interviews, you really brought people to life, but about their good intentions for this technology.
And I do want to get into that a little bit.
But for stepping back from a big picture view, The technology itself obviously isn't good or bad, but it's how we use it.
And it seems like this is just humans are natural voyeurs.
It seems so easy and exploitable.
What do you think are some of the greatest dangers in that regard that you can see coming down the pipeline?
Imagine you yourself have the superpower to watch an entire city simultaneously.
Now, initially, you will, like any superhero, use it for very noble ends.
You will track down violent criminals.
You will bring murderers to justice.
But, as you're doing all that, you might also notice that there are people doing lesser crimes.
Maybe someone's, you know, illegally dumping garbage in an area where they shouldn't.
And you think, well, I have this capability.
I might as well, you know, see what they're up to, track them down and bring them to justice too.
As you work your way down the order of criminal acts, you very soon start finding yourself rubbing up against Let's say grey areas, areas where the law isn't so clear, where perhaps someone is exercising a constitutional right, and yet that activity
goes up against some of your principles.
So maybe, to give you an obvious example, the neighbors in the area that you're watching decide that they don't really like to be watched by this person constantly from above.
And so they organize a petition to make you stop.
Well, obviously you don't want to stop because you think you're serving a just cause.
Well, you're gonna See where they go.
See where they associate.
Make sure that they're not doing any illegal acts that you could potentially, I don't know, use against them.
That's a very natural progression, because as you say, humans are naturally disposed to watch, and we're also naturally disposed to see things the way we want to see them.
A peaceful protest, in my eyes, might be a riotous assemblage of thugs in the eyes of somebody else.
That's why we have laws that prevent the completely untethered use of surveillance technologies, because that is a human instinct that we have to abuse them.
That's why we need controls.
I'll give you some specific examples since you asked about the dangers of this technology.
Say there's a big public protest.
Because this camera watch is such a wide area, you can follow thousands of protesters back to their homes.
Now you have a list of the home addresses of all the people involved in a political movement.
Not only that, if on their way home, you witness them committing some crime,
I don't know, breaking a traffic regulation, say, illegally parking,
frequenting a location that is known to be involved in the drug trade,
then you can use that surveillance data against them to essentially shut them up,
even though your real motivations are to stop them from doing that constitutional activity.
Then there is the personal privacy element.
Maybe there is a law enforcement analyst working in one of these departments who wishes to see what his wife is getting up to during the day.
Follow someone who he wants to get some leverage over.
Maybe find a local businessman to blackmail.
The temptation to do those kinds of things only grows with the surveillance power that you have at hand.
And there is almost nothing as powerful as an all-seeing eye in the sky.
It makes me think of a personal situation in the early, mid-90s.
I was at Rutgers University, and there was some protest against the president, Fran Lawrence, for making some racist comments, and we had blocked a highway and walked up to the president's house.
A couple of years later, there was a bomb threat at our library, and I received a call from the local police authorities, who had me on one camera.
from that protest years before.
And there was a part of me that was actually happy because I knew I wasn't involved.
I was happy to help and tell them whatever I knew because a bomb threat is a serious
thing.
So there is this effect, and you write extensively about the good uses of this.
And I think that's something we're going to have to contend with because if say, you observed
a murder in Brooklyn in 2014 of Taekwon Heart.
And you write that if the technology was around at that point, they might have found the murderers
where it's an unsolved case right now.
How do you, from your experiences talking to people, how is the public grappling with this desire for justice and retribution?
Well, it is one of the questions of our time, Derek, because if we have the capability to bring a violent criminal to justice, Then we sort of have a responsibility to use that capability.
Am I right?
I saw the violent shooting of this 19-year-old boy, Tae Kwon Ha.
Fortunately, he didn't die.
But I don't feel particularly safe knowing that his assailants are still roaming free.
And if that technology had been available at the time, A really significant part of me would have wanted it to be used.
At the same time, as you say, I, like pretty much everybody else, don't want to be followed everywhere I go.
I don't want people to know my physical location at all times.
Not because I have anything crazy to hide, but because I want to enjoy my full liberty.
And a part of enjoying your liberty is feeling free from a watchful eye.
There is a significant chilling effect if a person believes they're being watched.
Maybe I won't attend that political protest, even though it's completely legal, because I know that I might be on camera.
Are there ways of finding a balance?
I believe that there are.
And there are a couple of reasons why I believe there are.
One is that we found that balance in the past.
If you consider wiretapping technology, that is systems that allow law enforcement to listen in on your phone calls.
When that technology was first introduced in the early 20th century, there were no controls and so police were used As controls were imposed, there were a set of really strict requirements, namely that you need a warrant, probable cause, as deemed by a judge with court order, to listen in on a private conversation.
If you If you do get a warrant, it's because, in a perfect world, you have a good reason to have a warrant.
A crucial thing, though, is that the whole system breaks down if the surveillance technologies themselves and the rules that control them are not publicly known.
Say you're living in a city and you can see a big surveillance balloon that's hovering over your neighborhood, but you have no idea how it's being used and what sort of rules it is subject to, and the police department won't tell you anything.
Well, that's going to have a really serious chilling effect on you.
You're not to enjoy your full liberty. If on the other hand the police
department happily gives you a detailed memorandum explaining all the cases in which the
technology can and cannot be used then you will know with a high level of confidence
that you're not going to be watched for the wrong reasons. I'm also optimistic about
the ability to find a balance because we've seen in recent history, in the last few months,
Cities having these conversations and coming up with very sensible rules.
The major case that people have been talking about recently is San Francisco, which passed an ordinance that mostly got national media attention because it banned facial recognition.
But if you look at that ordinance, it also has a whole number of really reasonable clauses that can be applied to all sorts of surveillance techniques.
One of which is that no government agency in the city of San Francisco can employ a new surveillance technology without first getting public approval.
And that at least cures the transparency element.
The fact that people are having these conversations more and more gives me a lot of hope that we will see similar rules popping up All over the country and that those roles will get more and more sophisticated as those conversations continue.
Well, first, thank you for correcting me on Taekwon Hard.
He wasn't murdered.
That was that was correct.
But concerning San Francisco, I wonder, though, and you could probably speak to this having talked to so many people when you have.
I live in California as well.
I live in Los Angeles.
California is a very progressive state in a lot of ways, but we're a perfect example of, you know, since 1997, we had recreational marijuana and then legal marijuana, and now CBD is everywhere, marijuana is recreational, but on a federal level, it's still not legal at all.
So there's this disparity in the law where a lot of companies, Arizona Iced Tea recently, they're now infusing CBD, and that's an international product, but then they're concerned because it's still not federally legal.
I wonder if you've seen any tension between, say, San Francisco, where the city government is implementing these rules, but how about on a federal level?
Do we have any concerns about the federal government disregarding such rules?
It's a fantastic question because, as I point out in the book, These conversations are not happening at a federal level.
As far as I know, there has only been one congressional document that speaks to the potential dangers of wide-area airborne surveillance.
And that's a problem because there are a lot of federal agencies that are very eager to use this technology.
The FBI has an extensive extensive aerial surveillance program.
We know that the FBI has taken an interest in these military-grade wide area surveillance
products.
The Department of Homeland Security has an extensive aerial surveillance program and
has taken an interest in these products, as has the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals.
So far, we have not, to my knowledge, seen all that much outright tension between the
local level and the state level when it comes to the use, at least, of aerial surveillance
technologies.
Then again a lot of these operations and the conversations that happen around them are shrouded in secrecy.
So there is a good chance that were there any tension or pushback from the local level we would not hear about it.
I think that if you do see more and more cities at a national level implementing these kinds of controls on surveillance technology, then you could potentially imagine some tensions arising.
Hopefully, though, that won't happen because if Congress and federal agencies step up to the task of actually controlling these technologies as well, then the state level and the federal level and the local level may see a little more eye-to-eye on these measures.
But again, that needs to happen quickly because the technology is already here and the discussions at a federal level are not yet happening.
How about internationally?
Because obviously this book is very heavily rooted in the U.S.
and you do mention some other countries, but other governments would be much less likely to care about legislation and much more likely to just care about monitoring their population at all times.
Absolutely.
And that's why the proliferation of this technology is particularly troubling.
We know, for example, that Chinese research institutions in recent years have invested considerable resources in developing certain capabilities for case is that a lot of the research that I found had to do
not with building cameras, but with building algorithms to analyze the data from those
cameras.
Now, why is that troubling?
Because a whole city, as viewed through a camera, is a lot of information for human
eyes to process.
If you can process that information with a really smart computer vision system, then the surveillance becomes activated and you can see everything.
At once.
It's also particularly troubling because we know that China has an abysmal record when it comes to civil liberties and its use of surveillance technologies.
We know that it has an extensive program of surveillance in some of the western provinces where the Uyghur minority lives.
With a camera like the cameras that I discuss in the book, they'd be able to do all sorts of unthinkable things.
And as you say, there are very little controls on it.
It's also worrying that a growing number of technology firms are developing These types of capabilities and appear to be willing to sell them to whomever is willing to pay.
We know that Israeli firms are developing this technology.
We know that Chinese firms are developing this technology.
One firm that is particularly concerning is Hikvision, which is one of the global leaders in CCTV camera technology, and increasingly they're developing these very high-resolution, wide-angle, ground-level cameras that could, say, watch an entire large public square at once.
We also know that a number of militaries have taken an interest in this technology.
We know that there are researchers, for example, in Germany and the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
We know that the United Arab Emirates, another country with a poor track record, is in the process of acquiring a number of drones equipped with a very sophisticated American wide area surveillance system from a US firm.
That was part of a deal that Congress attempted to block.
because of human rights concerns, but that block was vetoed by President Trump. And so it appears
to be going through. You mentioned Israel and there has been some write-ups about their security
at their airports and how guards are trained to watch for facial expressions and pantomimes
in order to pick out potential problems, which from what I've read has a good track record.
But there's there's debate with that.
But you also you write about Amazon that has developed a technology that can detect emotional states based on facial expressions.
But the problem, if you read the literature and psychology from the last hundred years, is that facial expressions have cultural connotations.
And so now you're getting into very dicey territory in terms of racial profiling.
Did you find any problems with this technology, either in terms of the technology itself or the people behind it, with any sort of profiling of that nature?
Well, you ask a fantastic question and it actually speaks to the dangers, not just specifically of facial recognition or emotion recognition, but any kind of automated surveillance system.
And the problems are the following.
One, as you point out, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that suggests that all sorts of different algorithms and automated analysis systems in use today are biased.
We certainly know that's the case, for example, of facial recognition systems.
We also know that it is likely to be possible in algorithms that Do predictive policing based on historical crime data for particular neighborhoods.
So there's the bias element, which is a big one.
There's also the reliability element.
When computers are analyzing something as subtle as a set of potentially suspicious behaviors, they're likely to make mistakes.
And it's not always clear to the human operators who are working with that automated system when it will make a mistake and when it won't.
That makes the relationship between the computer and the human very, very troublesome.
The third part of that that's worrying is that now with automated detection systems you are, as I mentioned earlier, able to activate vast amounts of surveillance data that previously would have been pretty much in much of it and it would have taken so much time and energy
for humans to work through it.
I'll give you an example of that.
Say you have a city like London that has very dense coverage of CCTV cameras.
Now, a single CCTV camera or maybe multiple CCTV cameras are not tremendously dangerous technologies.
But what if you apply a really sophisticated object tracking
and facial recognition system to that dense network of CCTV cameras.
Now, when someone potentially suspicious pops up on one CCTV feed, you can click on them and say,
hey computer, tell me every time this person appears in any CCTV camera from across the city.
Now, whereas previously you had one person visible in one place, you can automatically track people
wherever they go in a city.
That is a truly, truly formidable capability because all it takes is one person to do a couple
of commands into a keyboard and now you can see someone persistently.
Um...
So it's not just that the automation itself is potentially risky and potentially fallible, but it's also that automation is appearing at a time when so much data is already collected about us, And once that data is activated, there's very little room for us to hide.
In Los Angeles.
I've lived here for eight years.
I've become accustomed.
We use helicopters.
The police force uses helicopters often for tracking.
So you kind of get used to it.
It's annoying because when it's at three in the morning, it wakes you up.
I live on the top floor of my building.
But but there's this sense of, OK, it's the police and helicopters.
They're tracking a criminal in a car right now.
And while it's annoying, you're kind of, again, happy it's there.
But I did not know that you basically have no privacy rights for tracking in a public space, which is airspace.
I wonder, given what we've seen as precedent over the last few years about people Unknowingly, but then sort of willingly giving up privacy, their data to say, Facebook, Google, Amazon, all of these companies.
And they're not really being a large mobilization against this.
It's more of just like, well, it's part of what we're dealing with and not thinking that deeply about it until it actually affects you on a personal level.
I wonder if you think we'll see any sort of public mobilization against these technologies or if you've witnessed them so far.
I'm optimistic.
I think that we will, just as we are seeing, albeit slowly, a mobilization against some of the large internet firms because of all the data that they collect on us.
People are starting to realize that perhaps the current regulations in place for protecting our privacy are not quite up to the task of regulating all the tools that are now at the disposal of even small enforcement agencies in the country.
You point to one very, very good example of that, which is that we do not, as per standing US privacy law and precedent, have any expectation of privacy in any place It doesn't matter whether you're in a backyard, in a secluded neighborhood surrounded by tall trees.
If you are visible from above, anything that can be seen of you doing is totally fair game.
Now that made sense at a time when the only aerial surveillance technologies that were in existence were expensive, loud, rare police helicopters that could only be used very sparingly for high priority investigations and operations.
You could have a fairly reasonable set of expectations that if you didn't see a helicopter directly over your head you probably were not being watched.
Because with these wide area surveillance technologies, a single aircraft flying so high that you may not even be able to spot it from the ground can be watching you in fine-grained detail.
And that's completely legal.
Because in the eyes of the law, that high-altitude persistent surveillance airplane is no different from a low-altitude helicopter.
Whenever I tell someone About the fact that these technologies described in the book are completely legal.
I always get a reaction.
There is no one who says, well, that makes sense.
Everyone seems to be in agreement that perhaps some update to the law is necessary.
And so that gives me a tremendous amount of hope for the future because if enough people start realizing that the law really is out of date, that's what's going to create the kind of mobilization that does make things change.
Now, another That is contributing to that change is the drone.
And when I say drones I don't mean the very large high-altitude military drones that you see in foreign wars.
I mean the kind of drones that you or I can buy on Amazon for a few hundred dollars.
Because those drones also fall under the same category of aircraft that have free reign to watch anything from the sky.
And People are starting to realize that in an era where anybody can buy a drone on the internet for a couple of hundred dollars this rule that we have no expectation of privacy from above maybe isn't really gonna work anymore because previously your neighbor wasn't going to hire a helicopter just to snoop on you but they could buy a drone because it's only a couple hundred dollars and that is being discussed and debated not only on a local level
But at a federal level too.
And hopefully in the next few years we are going to see some level of regulation that will find some kind of compromise that will allow growth in that sector, which is a good thing because of all the positive uses of the technology, while at the same time at least achieving a sort of level of reasonable privacy protections that As a baseline, people can agree to.
I'm actually quite surprised.
I live a couple of miles from Beverly Hills and I imagine, you know, there's all the bus tours and where you're on the streets and they point out the stars homes.
I'm actually surprised there hasn't been more footage of people flying drones over those areas first for paparazzi and whatever.
But I also think if that happened, you'd see legislation moving much quicker if a bunch of millionaires started getting spied on in such a manner.
Absolutely.
I believe that California has some level of privacy protection against paparazzi drones.
Obviously, it being California, where Hollywood is, that makes a certain amount of sense.
But there's a problem there, which is that you can have any number of rules regulating drone use as you wish.
That doesn't mean that those rules are easy to enforce.
Let's say you live in a secluded mansion.
You're a celebrity and you love your privacy and you see a drone flying over your backyard.
So you hop on the phone, call 9-1-1, 10 minutes later the cops show up and the drone is long gone.
These rules can be exceedingly difficult to enforce and so That's why just the creation of the rules, especially when it comes to drones and the use of drones by private citizens, may not always be enough.
There's also going to have to be education to ensure that people know what they can and cannot do.
I mean, at a very extreme level, there are a lot of, there is a lot of interest these days
in counter drone technology, ways of shooting drones out of the sky.
You can imagine that that's a very appealing tool for someone very, very wealthy who loves their privacy.
There is a catch to that, though, which is that understanding federal U.S.
law, it is illegal to shoot down a drone.
And so you are probably going to get in more trouble for shooting down a drone than for flying a drone over somebody else's property.
I also read, was it in your book?
I'm spacing now though, but that about Amazon and their drone policy, where they can fly into, they have a patent to where if they fly into a private space, they can video the area and then all of a sudden products they think you'll need based on your private property will start showing up in your Amazon feed.
That is correct.
That is a patent that Amazon was granted a few years ago.
Now, it being a patent, that doesn't mean that Amazon will definitely act upon it.
But we know that Amazon is a company that loves using data and drones collect a heck of a lot of data.
And if there are Amazon drones crisscrossing the skies, they are going to be collecting all kinds of pieces
of information that can feed into not only Amazon's product recommendations, as the patent describes,
but also Amazon's partnerships to law enforcement, for example, or other Amazon government services.
Maybe Amazon will be able to sell local governments regular, up-to-the-minute updates on traffic conditions based on the number of cars that its drones count on the way to delivering their packages.
Some of those applications could be very innocuous, perhaps even beneficial.
But again, In the absence of proper controls, you have all kinds of concerns that you're going to want to think about.
And without those controls, those concerns can become real very, very quickly, because we know that companies like Amazon live off data.
And if it's legal, they'll probably do it.
I believe that was in, and this is how I discovered your book, when you were interviewed for Long Reads.
I think you mentioned the Amazon, but that's where I, yeah.
Yeah.
So, last question.
You make one prediction in the book, in a footnote, that in 10 years' time, we will have a third license plate on our cars, which will be on the roof of our cars, so that these technologies can track us that way.
And I'm wondering if you have any other predictions, now that the book is out and you're spending more time thinking about these topics.
That footnote is funny.
It has gotten so much attention since the book came out.
And that really threw me off because I, you know, I was writing about police departments following cars with aerial surveillance technologies and not being able to see license plates.
And it just seemed so obvious to me that, you know, we're going to have license plates on our roofs within a few years.
Let's see if it actually happens.
Perhaps now that the book is out and so many people have heard about it and seem to be pretty displeased by the prospect, there wouldn't be the political traction to get that implemented.
You know, it's very difficult to look into the crystal ball, but one of the predictions that I really stand by is that whether or not Every city in America will someday be watched by a all-seeing eye in the sky.
I do believe that every city will be watched in some wide area way.
What do I mean by that?
Even if you don't have an airplane doing this type of surveillance,
there are all kinds of other technologies that can track us wherever we go at all times of day.
You could put the same types of cameras on the tops of buildings, for example.
You could apply tracking algorithms to CCTV cameras.
You could use a dense network of license plate readers.
All of these surveillance technologies operate on a very similar principle,
which is collect everything and then separate the wheat from the chaff.
Because it's only when you collect everything that you can see crimes that you previously did not know about.
It's a big data theory of surveillance.
And in big data, the thinking is that you suck up as much information as possible and then you apply very sophisticated analysis to pick out things that may be of interest.
That's concerning because with the advent of automation, This data can be analyzed in all kinds of unimaginable ways, and it can be particularly analyzed to look for anomalies, because anomalies are considered suspicious, and anomalies can lead us to crimes before they happen.
By the way, there's also a movie about that called Minority Report, highly recommended.
Great movie, great movie, absolutely.
And that's worrying.
We don't want to live in a society where every deviation from the norm is marked as suspicious.
So that's why I have this rather glum prediction that we are headed down a path toward wide area surveillance.
But I like ending things on a positive note.
And that is why when people ask me, Arthur, how do you sleep at night
when you spend all day writing about these nightmarish technologies?
I say I sleep very, very well.
I'm tremendously optimistic.
And I'm optimistic above all else because I feel like we really have no choice but to be optimistic.
Pessimistic people, people who believe that we are headed towards a fully panoptic society and there is nothing that we can do about it, are not the people who go to their local town council meetings when the local law enforcement is considering whether to buy a new powerful surveillance technology.
Pessimistic people do not write to their local representatives.
They don't write to Capitol Hill.
They don't seek out ways of making a difference.
And I feel like we have reached a point in the history of surveillance where we truly have no choice but to be optimistic.
And the levels of progress, those signs of progress that we have seen in the last few years and months that I talked about earlier in the interview, I think are ample evidence to me that we are seeing more and more of that kind of optimism.
And so I'm going to sleep well tonight, I'm going to sleep well tomorrow night, and the week after and months and years ahead on that, right up until the day when I get a letter
