A short report about the advanced technical possibilities of surveillance. But glasses also mean fragile. It is not too far to the fragmentation of the individual and thus to a pile of broken glass. Needless to say, but: 1984 was the day before yesterday and fictional ...
"I woke up to pounding on my door," says Andrej Holm, a sociologist from the Humboldt University. In what felt like a scene from a movie, he was taken from his Berlin home by armed men after a systematic monitoring of his academic research deemed him the probable leader of a militant group. After 30 days in solitary confinement, he was released without charges. Across Western Europe and the USA, surveillance of civilians has become a major business. With one camera for every 14 people in London and drones being used by police to track individuals, the threat of living in a Big Brother state is becoming a reality. At an annual conference of hackers, keynote speaker Jacob Appelbaum asserts, «to be free of suspicion is the most important right to be truly free». But with most people having a limited understanding of this world of cyber surveillance and how to protect ourselves, are our basic freedoms already being lost?