Surveillance from the Perspective of Fiction

This post makes the interesting comment that the real analogy to the present NSA surveillance is not .  1984, but Lord of the Rings.  Not Big Brother and the infallible Thought Police, but the immensely powerful but ultimately fallible Eye of Sauron.  Certainly Tolkein offers and important psychological insight in his novel -- Sauron, despite his immense knowledge and power, is not infallible. He makes mistakes, most notably, assuming that because he wants to use the Ring to take over the world, anyone else who gets the Ring will also want to take over the world.  That some people might see taking over the world as inherently illegitimate and seek the destroy the ring so that no one can use it never crosses his mind.  It is a powerful metaphor. But Sauron is useless in any more detailed analysis for one simple and obvious reason -- we have no idea what his surveillance capacities are.  We know he has a Seeing Stone that can be used to see for some distance, and to communicate with anyone else who has a Stone.  Indeed, we know that he used the Seeing Stone to capture Saruman and Denethor.  Other than that, we really don't know whether the Eye of Sauron is literal or metaphoric.  Does actually look around in all directions and physically see everything that transpires in Middle Earth, or is the Eye a metaphor for his general sources of information, most of which come from spies.  Either interpretation is plausible.

1984, by contrast, is very direct and literal in the surveillance capacity shown.  Everywhere, in every room and on the outside of every building is a two-way viewing screen, and even in the absence of such screens there may be microphones.  Children inform against their parents.  Secret agents of the Thought Police are everywhere, and no one knows until too late who they are.  No one ever knows when they are or are not being watched, which naturally inhibits any show of dissent.  Winston and Julia think they have rented a secret hideaway, only to find that the proprietor is an agent of the Thought Police.  But at the end, their powers are shown to be much greater and more fearsome that Winston ever suspected.  He has a small area of his room outside the view of the telescreen, where he hunches, writing his unorthodox thoughts in a diary.  He leaves a speck of dust on the page to see if it has been tampered with.  Later he learns that the thought police had been studying him all this time, like a specimen under a microscope, had known all the things he thought he was hiding, and had even carefully replaced the dust speck on the pages of his diary.  In short, they really do seem to be omniscient.

There is one other more realistic (though not wholly realistic)* work on the actual surveillance practices of what was probably the most thoroughgoing surveillance state ever to exist in the real world -- The Lives of Others, describing surveillance as practiced by the Stasi (secret police) in East Germany.  I want to use 1984 and (later) The Lives of Others to address three issues on surveillance -- the technical limits on it, the legal limits on it, and the appropriateness of such laws.  More to follow.

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*It is highly realistic in the extent of surveillance going on.  It is unrealistic in showing an agent responsible for sending reports secretly send false information and allow his target to engage in dissident activities in safety.  In fact, all the watchers were also being watched and would never be able to get away with such a thing.