Official News page 2

THE EYE IN THE SKY

by Hazed

Governments always want to control their citizens, and a key part of that control is to be able to know where everybody is, and what they are doing, at all times. Surveillance, in other words. The low tech way is to employ spies to keep an eye on the people you really want to know about - the trouble-makers - and for the rest, rely on informers from within the general population to tell tales about each other.

There are, however, a number of problems inherent in this kind of surveillance. You need a lot of spies to do the watching, and you end up collecting a vast amount of information on people that then needs to be analyzed. You also have the perennial dilemma: who watches the watchers? Can your spies really be trusted to have the interests of the rulers at heart?

Things get a lot easier when technology advances. The vast army of spies can be replaced by cameras to record everybody, wherever they go, and the analysis of the enormous pile of security footage can be undertaken by software agents that will spot suspicious behavior and bring it to the attention of someone who can take action. Of course, no software is foolproof, and the most skilled of the criminals and trouble-makers will find ways to circumvent the all-pervasive surveillance. Still, the technology is perfectly adequate to keep an artificial eye on the general populace, who of course the rulers distrust and expect to engage in anti-social behavior at any moment, unless deterred by the knowledge that big brother is watching them.

As the cameras get smaller and more ubiquitous, so the counter-measures increase to give the forces of opposition a chance to plot in private and to foil the face-recognition, stance analysis, behavioral interpretation and stress detectors in public. The balance shifts one way and then the other as the security arms race hots up.

And then, one day, something happens that completely changes the security balance. The technology at last becomes so ubiquitous - and so cheap - that it is no longer the sole preserve of the security forces. Anyone can afford to operate their own flying spy-cams and recording devices, which are now so small as to be very hard to detect. Result: the populace starts to spy on the police, the security forces, even the government. There is no privacy for anybody, not even for the rulers; used to doing their shady deals behind firmly closed doors, they suddenly find themselves and their doings open to scrutiny. After a period of madness, with everybody frantically spying on everybody else, where embarrassing footage of politicians on the toilet are published alongside celebrities first thing in the morning without their makeup and - on a more local level - details of what your neighbor gets up to behind the net curtains, a kind of stalemate is reached, followed by an agreement on all sides to stop using the spy technology.

This pattern gets enacted over and over on different worlds in the Galaxy, the leaders of none of them seeming able to learn from the experience of older worlds. And so, inevitably, when a planet reaches technological level it will start to build extended surveillance facilities, to use on its citizens. This reduces dissatisfaction - people may still be pissed off with those in charge, but they are too cowed to do, or even say, anything about it. It's only available as an option for a while; when a planet's economy converts to leisure, surveillance ceases to have an effect.

You can read about the new surveillance build for Technocrats here.

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