National Geographic

THEY ARE WATCHING YOU 65``````5REHUW'UDSHU is a contributing writer for the magazine.His previous feature, about young technology entrepre-neurs in Africa, ran in the December 2017 issue.clearly see the shimmering shapes of 520 smallbodies of water—a proportion far in excess ofwhat the insurance company’s customers hadclaimed. Neligh shrugged and offered a thinsmile. “People lie, you know,” she said.Now her client had the truth. What would it dowith this information? Conduct a surprise raid onthe somnolent hamlets of Plano? Jack up premi-ums? Order images that might show constructioncrews installing new Jacuzzis and Spanish tileroofs? The future is here, and in it, truth is morethan a kindly educator. It is a weapon—againsttimber poachers and burglars and mad bombersand acts of God, but also against the lesser angelsof our nature. People lie, you know. The age oftransparency is upon us.As I walked back to my hotel, I thought aboutthe two moped riders in Islington, as I often hadin the months since I surveilled them. I wonderedif they had been arrested. I wondered if they wereguilty of anything at all, apart from the crime ofbeing conspicuously interesting on an otherwisedull morning. I wondered if they would everknow that unseen strangers had been watchingthem, just as a stranger might now be watchingme—someone somewhere squinting into a CCTVmonitor at the spectacle of a lone figure walkingfast on a dark and otherwise vacant street ona chilly night without a coat on, as if in flightfrom something. j