Electronic surveillance

‘Under Surveillance’ Author on the Hidden Costs of Being Watched

There’s a moment in Under Surveillance — Randolph Lewis’ accessible, ruminative, anxiety-ridden new book on American surveillance culture — when the author travels to Walden Pond. He’s come in search of the same pastoral refuge that drew Henry David Thoreau, but instead he hears helicopter blades thumping overhead. Most of his fellow visitors are staring at their iPhones, and the walking trails are marked with barbed wire. While Lewis is careful not to romanticize the past, he concludes that all this technology “would surely grate on Thoreau’s nerves.” Even in a place symbolic of American wilderness, people are playing Angry Birds, which “the NSA surreptitiously mines for clues about its millions of users,” and posting their location on Instagram in the very spot where Thoreau watched ants. What’s the world coming to?