[carapace]

The way I like to phrase it is that the future has two main "attractors": Star Trek and North Korea. If ubiquitous surveillance is unstoppable (and I reluctantly conclude that it is) then the primary differential is whether and how much the folks in power have privacy from the rest of us.

It's worth pointing out that, done right, in return for your privacy you get an end to war and crime. That's a hellofa trade-off.

As a daydream years ago, I thought up a thing: public surveillance kiosks (like the ones I understand they are trying out in New York) that have cameras and large screens. They work by randomly exchanging (nowadays I can just call them) "vines", video snippets, and displaying them. So each kiosk is displaying vines from the others around the zone (city, world, whatever) and there's a very simple UI: tap to rewind, click a button to escalate. Anyone who sees anything weird on a kiosk can easily review it and call attention to it (like 911 but lower intensity.)

This would achieve a monitoring function without any special privileges and with limited privacy impact. It would have to be part of some larger system, but it hopefully gives the general "drift"?