Google Street View

Quite a resource/invasion of privacy (depending on your perspective), isn't it? I thought it was only inner cities that were on there, but no my locality was there, right down to individual blades of grass.

It makes one wonder what kind of classified surveillance technology is available. If Command wanted to, they could probably watch you on the crapper. Not that I want to make you paranoid or anything.

But so much data available - every transaction you make, every CCTV camera, every keylogged computer history, every laptop webcam permanently recording (I have a sticker over mine, haha!), and so few minds around to sort through it all...that I suspect is a logistical nightmare that the Department of Databases struggles to find a way around.

To an extent the sociological purpose of the surveillance state is not to actually watch us 24/7, merely to give us the impression we are being watched. Do you think someone is watching all those CCTV cameras for instance? Or, do you know which cameras have a human monitor and which do not? Doesn't matter. The mentality is what counts; the surveillance state is a mind game.

Orwellian. This reflects the description provided in 1984:
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The other side of the technological double-edged sword, however, is that these government/corporate thugs who have enjoyed a certain kind of 'privacy' for centuries, are now more and more in full view. They will be way more paranoid about all this than any of us are. Hidden cameras are a bitch, eh fellas?