Science Fiction Got Surveillance All Wrong
As a journalist contacting sources incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prisons, I must send letters to a warehouse hundreds of miles away in Florida, where they’re digitized and kept indefinitely by a company called Smart Communications—it’s never clear how many people read them. Smart Communications earns millions of dollars from prisons and jails across the country each year, highlighting a bizarre contradiction in how the United States thinks of privacy: There are some people whose surveillance we hardly ever think about. And the literature we reach for to understand government scrutiny rarely takes them into account.
Revelations that the National Security. But despite how frequently the book is deployed to explain our reality, : The novel’s “Party” is totalizing, affecting everyone, the author Noah Berlatsky argues, and that’s not how surveillance functions in the United States. The so-called right to privacy, so often violated these days, has , Sarah E. Igo writes in her review of , Amy Gajda’s history of privacy in American law. And in , Alice Goffman documents how the burden of police monitoring weighs most heavily on poor communities of color, .
