The brain thrives on information like the lungs thrive on oxygen.

Surveillance emerged from law enforcement, criminal, and penal backgrounds.

Some important sources of potential surveillance are under your control.

Surveillance comes naturally to the brain because of its need for explanations for events and, most of all, for people, both individually and collectively. Why this? Why now? What does it all mean?—these kinds of questions. The brain thrives on information like the lungs thrive on oxygen.

Nothing creates anxiety more than the unexpected and the unexplained.

In general, the more we learn about a person, the more likely it is that the accrued knowledge can be put to some kind of use. This is especially true when it concerns knowledge gathered by widespread surveillance of the actions of many people at once.

Surveillance is particularly valuable for a government, whether it be a democracy, an autocracy, or an oligarchy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that we currently live under the most sensitive and extensive surveillance in our country’s history. How did we come to this?

Beginning in the late 18th century and up until the present, surveillance has been dedicated to detecting and controlling crimes and criminals. Surveillance techniques date from the panopticon—a design concept from 1787 that made it possible for a single security guard in a prison to observe multiple inmates without their awareness of being an object of someone’s surveillance.

The design of the panopticon, as envisioned by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, ensured that prisoners would never know at any given moment whether they were being observed. Bentham referred to the resulting uncertainty produced in the prisoner as “the sentiment of invisible omnipresence.”

One hundred sixty-two years later, George Orwell, in his novel 1984 (published in 1949), captured the agonizing uncertainty created by surveillance: “There was of course, no way of knowing that you were being watched at any given moment…you had to live…in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Today, Orwell’s 1984 panopticon-like covert surveillance has moved beyond penology to become a feature of everyday reality.

We’ve become accustomed to closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) in shopping malls operated and monitored from central control rooms; apartment buildings with receptionists varying attention from multiple screens depicting happenings in the elevators, hallways, and just about everywhere, with the presumed exception of the interiors of the private apartments. As a result, our brains have become conditioned to living in what is often referred to as an “electronic panopticon.”

At the experiential level, we encounter cookies tracking our website visits, or smartphones logging our location, or cameras recording our whereabouts, and in many instances, identifying us by facial recognition programs.

Our nation’s schools and offices are currently immured in intrusive and manipulative surveillance technology.

Internet monitoring of students by their schools is now so widespread that it rarely raises any objections. And it’s all perfectly legal. Since many schools provide students with their laptop computers, the schools retain the legal right to “listen in” on the information exchanges students may be engaged in. It’s estimated that almost one-half of American school children are currently subject to surveillance.

In regard to office surveillance, not everybody is surveilled at work, but among those who are, a pervasive sense of vulnerability, self-consciousness, and varying intensities of anxiety are common. Those under frequent and regular surveillance often speak of a sense of being under constant observation, to which they respond by self-censorship.

Not surprisingly, workplace surveillance exerts a measurable effect on the workplace, since neither employer nor manager can ever be certain whether they are under surveillance at any given moment (that “sentiment of invisible omnipresence” again). Expressions of subjective opinion, judgments, or criticism of the workplace or authority hierarchy may be risky and are almost always forbidden.

But something like a widespread nationwide electronic panopticon could not exist in our current society, right?

On September 12, 2024, Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder and one of the richest men in the world, gave a talk at his company about a near future when artificial systems would have the capacity to monitor citizens around the clock via an intensive network of cameras and camera-laden drones. When asked about the benefit of such a system, Ellison channeled in his response the early thinking of Jeremy Bentham: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

Ellison’s model is even creepier than Bentham’s panopticon or George Orwell’s fictional description. AI systems, instead of human observers, are in control, thus circumventing the biggest obstacle to any human-dependent system: When the system becomes vast enough, there are simply too few people available to fill the roles of observers.

Despite the widespread enthusiasm about multitasking, the human brain can only really concentrate on one thing at a time or, in this case, one image at a time. In contrast, AI, even when observing thousands of monitors at once, can swiftly direct attention to one frame featuring a person of interest or a person engaged in an activity of interest.

Of course, surveillance is not all bad. If it was it would have been constrained or even eliminated a long time ago. A smorgasbord of technical tools and systems is presently on the market that prevents unauthorized access, break-ins, or intrusions into our homes and offices. Surveillance techniques mitigate potential personal threats. Biometrics—fingerprints and facial scans, retinal photos—provide reliable and secure methods for verifying identity. Unfortunately, that’s about all the good that we can expect from widespread surveillance. Worst of all is the shift in thinking brought about by surveillance.

Paranoia is an unfortunate tradeoff for surveillance’s positive effects. I’m not talking here about neurologic or psychiatric disorders, but what historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed “the paranoid style.”

In the November 1964 Harper’s Magazine, Hofstadter contributed an essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In his essay, he was careful to distinguish the paranoid style from clinical paranoia, recognizing that a person can exhibit the paranoid style yet be mentally normal. In other words, paranoid style has more “to do with the way in which ideas are expressed, than with the truth or fabrication of their content.”

In response to the current national surveillance frenzy, perfectly normal people are regularly displaying Hofstadter’s paranoid style. Look around you. Consider, as an example, the Uber driver who picked me up for an early morning trip to the office several weeks ago. When I pointed out to him that he was taking a needlessly lengthy route, he replied that his chosen route was “free of speed cameras.” Since he was driving well within the speed limit, he had little to fear from the speed cameras, I suggested. To this, he replied, “Speed cameras take pictures of every driver that goes by, even when they are not speeding.” When I asked, “Where did you learn that?” he lapsed into a silence that lasted throughout the remainder of the trip.

Surveillance represents a societal threat that, although we may have to live with some of it in the short term, we can do something about right now if we take a longer view.

First, we should recognize that, at least in the home, surveillance mechanisms are often freely chosen. In the interest of a “wired home,” we may link appliances, various gadgets, and communication devices to the internet. From toasters to television sets, we install electronic devices that, in theory, can provide information about our personal habits and inclinations.

Echo anyone? Lest any readers identify this inquiry as a privately held example of the “paranoid style,” let me quote from Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technological Responsibility at Brown University, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “In my house we have loud and enthusiastic political discussions and have disconnected our Echo entirely for fear of understatements being misconstrued later on.”

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t take advantage of internet connections. But if we are concerned, as we should be, about the creeping surveillance that we are all subjected to, the fewer and the more selective our connections, the better.

Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Long Shadow of Workplace Surveillance,” Wilneida Negrón & Aiha Nguyen; September 6, 2023.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “How AI and surveillance capitalism are undermining democracy,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian; August 21, 2025.

Data & Society, “The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance,” Aiha Nguyen; May 2021.

HBO Documentary Film, Surveilled, by Ronan Farrow, directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz; 2024.

Harper’s Magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter; November 1964.

Freethink, “Can humans purge the bots without sacrificing our privacy?” Ross Pomeroy; November 30, 2024.

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