Ashes Ashes

Episode 51 - "Eyes on Me" Surveillance technology continues to creep into our lives, whether it’s facial tracking in NY kiosks, invasive monitoring in Venezuela, China’s expanding social credit system, or entire cities being designed from the ground up in Egypt to better capture the intimate lives of its residents. These initiatives are driven by desires for profit and power, and justified through campaigns of fear. Technology however is just one facet of any surveillance machine. According to former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden in 2013: "the top 20% of American intelligence - that exquisite insight into an enemy's intentions - is generally provided by human sources." To understand the role in which we as individuals are turned into tools for surveillance, the so called “eyes and ears” of the state, we examine the historical development of crowd-sourced community policing, and the related programs that have been developed in the US for conscripting citizens into harvesting data on their neighbors, f