Spying is a very ancient profession. Two thousand years ago ancient Rome was full of spies, employed by emperors, powerful senators and priests to keep a secret eye on the population and sniff out any hint of treachery or unorthodoxy. They were kept busy, but they had limited techniques at their disposal: listening at doors, bribing informers, and simply watching the people they suspected. It must have been hard and unproductive work to be a Roman spy, and everybody hated them.
Things have changed. Long Island had its own patriotic spies in the Revolutionary War, and they are now treated as heroes. Indeed, in our more enlightened age the spy has become a positively romantic figure, from Mata Hari to James Bond and George Smiley. They belong to another and more glamorous world, a world of secrets where the fate of whole nations may hang in the balance over a missing formula, an intercepted message, or a kidnapped leader.
Real spies, or course, are more mundane and even rather sad figures, like Jonathan Pollard or Aldrich Ames, or the legions of more or less bureaucratic operatives employed by the government. However even these old-fashioned snoopers may soon be out of a job. We are all in the game now. Everybody can spy on everybody else. Whenever anything dramatic happens it seems that there is always someone standing by ready to record it on video. Millions of people must spend their whole lives just waiting, smart phones in hand, for the right moment.
It’s not just the smart phones. This year there has been a flood of new products booby trapped with tiny video recorders. Beware of anyone wearing sunglasses, a brooch, a badge, or a watch, carrying a pen, a thumb drive, or anything down to about an inch in size that could hide a camera. Soon they will be down to the size of the Higgs Boson particle. This is such a monumental invasion of privacy that it takes your breath away. We will soon all be on camera, all the time. No moment of indiscretion, stupidity, or humiliation will go un-recorded, and it will be posted on Facebook for the world to sneer at. There will be no more secrets.
The police are equipped with video cameras, and no doubt criminals will soon have them too, CCTV is everywhere, satellites in the sky and drones overhead can track our every move. This universal snooping is bound to spread. If we can do it, we will do it. Doctors will record patients and vice versa, everyone will film encounters with real estate agents, financial advisers, car salesman, boyfriends, and everyone who prefers not to go on the record with rash promises. Teachers of the future may face whole classrooms full of cameras. Every student will have one, from kindergarten on up, and the teachers had better have them too if they intend to say anything not in the textbook. In my time as a teacher I was in the habit of making off the cuff, ironic and usually politically incorrect remarks, but I would never dare to do that now. Back then students used to laugh at my comments, now they might start a riot, or a lawsuit, or sell the video to 60 Minutes.
Looking on the bright side, in the long run this universal mutual spying may produce a perfectly disciplined society, like North Korea or Orwell’s Airstrip One, where nobody will dare to step out of line. The only question is: who is going to watch those trillions of hours of incredibly boring video, and who will watch the watchers themselves?
Copyright: David Bouchier.
