Somebody’s watching

Early this century there was an outcry about the extent of CCTV surveillance in the UK. Britain had long been bristling with cameras, but the news that Londoners in particular were reportedly being caught on camera up to 300 times a day was particularly startling. Later, however, it turned out the estimates were vastly inflated: in fact, you would ‘only’ appear on CCTV about 70 times a day. In a way, though, the precise number didn’t matter. What mattered was the very that nobody could be sure at any time they weren’t being watched, at least in public. Then came Edward Snowden’s revelations of industrialised electronic spying, and suddenly worrying