National Geographic

58 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • FEBRUARY 2018forbidding view of a hyper-industrialized Lon-don in the year 2540, didn’t conceive of a world soacutely visualized that our most intimate secretscan’t always be concealed. Where would thatleave us? On the one hand, it stretches credulityto imagine the willful suppression of such tools.Says David Anderson, a London barrister whospent six years as the government’s independentreviewer of counterterrorism legislation, “Eitheryou think technology has presented us withstrong powers that the government should usewith equally strong safeguards, or you believethis technology is so scary we should pretendit’s not there. And I’m firmly in the first catego-ry—not because I say government is to be trust-ed, but instead because in a mature democracysuch as this one, we’re capable of constructingsafeguards that are good enough for the benefitsto outweigh the disadvantages.”On the other hand, allowing such technologicalprogress to find its way into a largely unregulatedmarketplace seems equally imprudent. JameelJaffer, the founding director of Columbia Univer-sity’s Knight First Amendment Institute, says, “Ido think that we live increasingly recorded andtracked lives. And I also think we’re only startingto grapple with the implications of that, so beforewe adopt new technologies or before we permitnew surveillance forms to entrench themselvesin our societies, we should think about what thelong-term implications of those surveillancetechnologies will be.”How to craft such judgments? Endeavoring todo so is particularly nettlesome when a break-through occurs that explodes our notion of how wecan view the world. In fact, a game changer of thissort has already emerged. The technology in ques-tion can monitor the Earth’s entire landmass everysingle day. It’s the brainchild of a San Francisco–based company called Planet, founded by twoidealistic former NASA scientists named WillMarshall and Robbie Schingler.Their headquarters resides in an unprepos-sessing warehouse in the gritty South of Marketneighborhood. The tableau inside is textbook Sil-icon Valley: more than 200, mostly young techiesin aggressively casual dress hunched silentlyAnd so as I talked with Tony Porter in thecavernous and highly surveilled cafeteria of theHome Office, I found myself repeating some-thing I’d expressed to him once before, monthsearlier: Didn’t this whole fear-of-Big-Brother im-pulse seem rather quaint now?“I now use that term in my speeches,” thesurveillance camera commissioner informedme with a pleased grin. Then he turned serious.Porter had recently visited the United Arab Emir-ates, a federation of monarchies that suppressesdissent and has a great deal of interest in surveil-lance technology. That struck Porter as ominous.“I get where you’re coming from,” he said. “Butsurveillance by the state is invasive, it’s power-ful, it’s capable of connectivity beyond people’swildest imaginations. That’s completely differentfrom, say, a selfie.“Look,” he went on, “the real threat is when wemove towards integrated surveillance. Large re-tailers are spending millions of pounds looking atevery conceivable element of this. I’m a middle-aged fat guy; I walk into a supermarket and im-mediately on the intercom they start advertisingfor croissants. What if it gets more sinister, andfrom my Facebook profile they can target mydaughter and ask where she shops? Who’s goingto regulate that? Or does it not need to be regu-lated? Is the horse already out of the barn? Is italready ‘quaint’?”## THE SEEMINGLY MINUTE-BY-MINUTEadvancements in surveillance technolo-gy can, to some civil libertarians, take onthe appearance of a runaway bullet train.As Ross Anderson, professor of securityengineering at the University of Cam-bridge, warns, “We need to be thinkingahead to the next 20 years. Because that’swhen you’ll have augmented reality, anOculus Rift 2.0, with at least 8,000 pixels per inch.So, sitting in the back of a lecture hall, you canread the text on a lecturer’s phone. At the sametime, the one hundred CCTVs in that lecture hallwill be able to see the password you’re punchinginto your phone.”Even Huxley, whose masterwork presents a