“If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” Nothing to fear unless you have a very good definition of “wrong” and know precisely whose definition is being used.

Another popular defence of pervasive surveillance is “privacy is a modern idea—until recently we lived in villages and everyone knew what everyone else was doing.” While this may have been true, the world beyond the village did not, except in very extreme cases, know what your were doing. Certainly not thousands of faceless contractors in concrete bunkers analysing at the bidding of secret actors further afield.

Even in a village, the extent to which people knew what was going on was limited to what was seen from behind windows and in the street. There was still an good degree of privacy within private communications and what went on behind closed doors.

There is danger in recording the history of your ideas, feelings and actions and allowing future scrutiny by agents unknown. The danger is the changing lens through which they will be seen; and the lens will change—just read your old diaries or look at photos of yourself twenty years ago and tell me that you still agree with your sentiments and fashion sense! The change will be wrought not only by the natural change in you, the subject, but in the attitudes, mores and policies of the future society or those claiming to have society’s interests at heart.

Societies change over time. What was acceptable then may not be acceptable now; what is acceptable now may not be acceptable in twenty years time. If conditions change—and I’m guessing we’re in for a tougher time in future than we’ve recently known (but that’s another discussion entirely)—the scrutiny that may be brought upon the stored histories of people may not see them in a flattering light. Try defending your embarrassing, teen-aged, extremist positions to the secret court of the future state.

Kafka, anyone?