State surveillance
*planted: 02/06/2024last tended: 02/06/2024
State surveillance is as old as the state,”1 as are debates on how that surveillance should be regulated and controlled. In Britain, as soon as a postal service was introduced, authorities began opening correspondence between suspected subversives and radicals. In 1840 the service was made far cheaper – and thus more widely-used – and in 1844 a political scandal known as the postal espionage crisis unfolded when these spying powers became widely-known to the public.
we now know that spy agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies have access to unfathomable quantities of data generated by individuals in the course of their everyday activities.
1. Elsewhere
1.1. In my garden
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