America’s Surveillance State

I’ve posted several times over the last few years on how the USA is rapidly overtaking Britain as the leading democratic ‘surveillance society’. It seems like some commentators in the USA now agree – Glenn Greenwald writes on the Salon magazine site, about his essay published by the libertarian Cato Institute, and the responses it has received from different parts of the US political spectrum. It’s all worth a read, although for British activists and academics in this area in particular, it will sound like what Yogi Berra famously described as ‘deja-vu all over again’… and it’s hardly new even in the States (see the work done by ACLU, Wired’s Danger Room, experts and academics like Bill Staples, Bruce Schneier and Torin Monahan, and popular books by Christian Parenti and Robert O’Harrow, for just a couple of examples).

Author: David

I'm David Murakami Wood. I live on Wolfe Island, in Ontario, and am Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies and an Associate Professor at Queen's University, Kingston. View all posts by David