Sinister Surveillance

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"I have installed security cameras all over Japan, because when you're rich, you can never be too paranoid."

—Seto Kaiba, Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series

There are cameras on every street. Private phones can be tapped. Every electronic device is open to monitoring, and a hundred or more companies, governments and secret organizations can and are accumulating all this information on individuals into a huge database of discrete files which a simple algorithm can use to divine anyone's actions. The wake of 9/11 has brought the likes of The Patriot Act in many countries, curtailing privacy and enhancing the legal tools for governments to spy on their own citizens.

We are being watched.

Of course, so are the criminals, terrorists, foreign spies and sundry malcontents. Surely, our well meaning governments will use these tools and powers to ensure our safety. Eh... no.

The problem with surveillance is that it's inherently squicky, sinister, and dark. It's what George Orwell warned us about, and even if it is used exactly for what it's intended for, the potential for misuse is terrifying.

Couple this with Everything Is Online and expanded government surveillance will be treated one of two ways, depending on the user:

  1. If the government or the good guys use it, it will most certainly not be a Magical Computer or the like, with a super Enhance Button. It will barely ever work, enemies thus tracked know how to avoid, hack, or shoot out cameras, and they'll invariably get the intel "five minutes too late" and fail to thwart Stage One of the Evil Plan.
  2. Villains on the other hand, can get this technology to sing and dance for them, tracking heroes with amazing precision, using crackers to fool any government techies, and generally stealing this technology out from under the governments nose and putting the heroes on the ropes. That is, if the technology isn't the villain to begin with.

Thankfully, the heroes always manage to escape earlier than the villains (e.g. less than a week vs. an implied 2–3 years). Villain Ball indeed.

This trope is usually part of an Anvilicious Aesop against government surveillance. Surely, something so ineffective and prone to hijacking can't be useful in real world. See also Surveillance as the Plot Demands and Big Brother Is Watching.

Examples of Sinister Surveillance include:

Anime and Manga

  • In CLAMP's Suki, Hinata's next-door neighbor and teacher is implied to have sinister intentions because he has cameras rigged up to watch her house. In fact he's actually her secret bodyguard.
  • Ghost in the Shell:
    • Public Security Section 9 has the IR system, apparently a network of cameras and vehicle tracking systems that cover the cities of Japan. When they need to find someone, they borrow the USA's ECHELON, enabling them to monitor all phone conversations in Japan in real-time. And they're the good guys.
    • And, of course, there's the (highly illegal) ability various entities have demonstrated of remotely watching through any cyberized individual's eyes unnoticed, or even pulling a Grand Theft Me over the 'net with a keypress.
    • Finally, we have the Interceptors: Micromachines that act as cameras and inhabit your eyes. Normally, they can only be installed after an extensive legal application is filed. The Laughing Man arc of Season 1 goes into full swing when Togusa discovers that the detectives investigating the Laughing Man case have been illegally bugged with Interceptors by their own supervisor. The issue plays second-fiddle when a fake Laughing Man attempts a public assassination.
  • Thanks to the Rumble-Rumble Fruit, and coupled with his Mantra, Eneru from One Piece can hear everything that's being said on Skypiea and know everyone's location.

Comic Books

  • The fascist party Norsefire uses these, linked to a computer system called Fate. Whom the leader of said fascist party is in love with. V is acutely aware of this fact.
  • Oracle from the DCU uses her surveillance of Gotham to help heroes on various missions, but she also watches Dick Grayson in his apartment. It's not known if he knows (he did grow up with Batman, who uses the same methods). If her own cameras are not sufficient she will hack someone else's.

Film

  • The Conversation[context?]
  • Eagle Eye has the evil AI use pretty much every terrorism inspired countermeasure to empower the two Action Survivors to evade every law enforcement agency out for them. Somewhat justified since she was expressly given many of these faculties, but her ability to control F-16's and shipping cranes does stretch belief.
    • If that stretches belief, then causing power lines to overload so much they explode and sever themselves perfectly on target with a man who is fleeing on foot wraps it into a goddamn Möbius strip.
    • Her ability to digitally control the ejector seat of an F-16 does more than stretch belief, considering that it doesn't have any electronic components to hack into.
  • The Bourne Supremacy frequently has Jason being chased by Mission Control, and cleverly avoiding them by waltzing past camera placements and the like. Perhaps justified since he is a trained super spy.
  • In The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, an innocent man is tagged as a spy by a government guy to distract another government guy. As he walks though the airport, agents are secretly taking his picture - but since he's eating a chewy candy that's stuck in his teeth, every shot of him has his face oddly contorted.
  • Enemy of the State[context?]
  • In the final act of The President's Analyst from 1967, the title character is abducted in a phone booth under the noses of the two American and Russian agents trying to secure his safety. The American concludes the booth (and all the phones in the country) was tapped; the Russian incredulously replies "Don! This is America, not Russia!"
  • In The Lives of Others, the Stasi rig Dreyman's house.

Literature

  • Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  • Various types in David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series of novels; it is even suggested by a son of one of the T'ang lords that every citizen (that's all 34 billion of them) should have a tracking/killing device operated into their skulls
  • A magical example in Witches Abroad. Every mirror in Genua can be used by Lady Lilith to ensure that everyone is behaving according to Fairy Tale stereotypes.
    • It's not just every mirror. It's every reflective surface. That window you passed? That puddle you stepped around? She can see you through those too. And in the reflection from the blade of your knife, as you cut up the meat you're eating for dinner.
  • In Daniel Suarez' Daemon, during a meeting of top government TLAs, one of them orders the NSA to track down the Daemon and everyone associated using Echelon. In a realistic subversion of this trope, NSA explains that the Daemon is using a sophisticated darknet for all its communications, and anyway, Echelon doesn't really work like that.
    • Played straight when it's discovered that the Daemon itself has infiltrated most of the accessible surveillance systems worldwide, either directly or through Social Engineering. However it's again played in a reasonably realistic fashion.

Live-Action TV

  • Also, Alias used Echelon several times.
  • Torchwood uses it by the good guys a lot.
  • In Spooks MI:5 can access pretty much every CCTV camera in the country, but it's far from omnipresent, and they often have to rely on teams of agents tailing a suspect instead.
  • On Heroes Volume 4, The Government can access and analyze traffic camera footage from all over the U.S. and identify the driver of a single car on the highway within minutes.
  • In the first episode of Star Trek: The Original Series to feature the Klingons, the Klingon military governor of a strategically located planet claimed Klingon society functioned this way:

Kor: Do you know why we are so strong? Because we are a unit. Each of us is part of a greater whole. Always under surveillance. Even a commander like myself. Always under surveillance, Captain.

  • Mark Gatiss' character in Sherlock, then subverted when viewers realize he isn't so sinister.
  • On The Prisoner, Number Six is always under surveillance... especially when he believes he isn't.
  • In Homeland, Carrie Mathison watches Brody's life through a series of cameras and mikes she has installed at his house.
  • In Blake's 7, the Federation's almighty presence is frequently signified by those white security cameras that show up everywhere, even the teaser.

Music

  • The music video for OOMPH!'s song Träumst Du? Has a Grounds Keeper or Janitor pleasuring himself over the surveillance he has of the Hot Teacher in her classroom with zooming and audio feeds. Quite the perverse video.

Tabletop Games

  • Paranoia. Fully justified, as Friend Computer has to watch everywhere, because that's where Mutant Commie Traitors can be found lurking.

Video Games

Web Comics

Web Original

  • Plenty in Broken Saints, partly serving also as Surveillance as the Plot Demands: BIOCOM staff housing has very tight security.
  • Features in Tony Jones' Alternate History work Cliveless World. The Panopticon, a Real Life proposed prison that reforms criminals by putting them under constant surveillance, becomes very popular and is applied to the general public as well as early as the eighteenth century. Eventually reaction to this creates an anti-surveillance ideology, the Nullopticon Movement.

Western Animation

  • Inspector Gadget, obviously: Dr. Claw has cameras everywhere.
    • Including, occasionally, Gadget's house.
  • Used occasionally in Batman: The Animated Series, which is often lampshaded by writer commentary. One episode in particular has the Joker show fellow villains a recording of a time he took over a late night television show - a video that includes camera shots backstage and all around the studio, in angles that shouldn't be possible. Another has Batman watch security videos of Mr. Freeze's origin, which for some reason includes close ups and camera cuts, as though someone not only used a film camera but edited it as well.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog, Dr. Robotnik often made use of stealthy, floating camera robots to spy on Sonic and his friends...Popular Science recently had an article on similar technology currently in development by the US Military.
  • Parodied in The Simpsons Movie when the family are on the run. We see a huge room full of government bureaucrats listening in on inane conversations until one of them overhears Marge on one of the bugs they installed on a train. The bureaucrat joyfully leaps up and declares, "We found them! The U.S. Government actually found somebody we're looking for!"
  • The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was particularly bad about this, as Shredder could pull up live surveillance feed from pretty much anywhere he damn well pleased. Sort of becomes a case of Fridge Logic when you consider that he was still never able to locate the turtles' lair.
  • Soundwave from Transformers Prime seems to be keeping tabs on everyone, in the premiere he's able to intercept communications between the Autobots and Agent Fowler without leaving the Nemesis. Aside from spying on enemies, he also keeps tabs on his fellow Decepticons in case any are plotting against Megatron. Made creepier by the fact that the only times he talks is in a distorted repeat of another character's dialogue.

Real Life

  • The United Kingdom: 4.2 million cameras, one for every 14 people (approximately) the Oyster card system which keeps track of your travel in the last month. ID cards scheme: cancelled.
    • Most all of those cameras are in private hands, however, and it seems that a good 80% don't provide good enough footage for a criminal court. Also, those Oyster Cards? They just have your bus (and train and tube) fare. And the government only wants records of between whom the e-mail was sent, not any of its content. Rather anticlimactic, really, but the government's anti-welfare fraud Government Information Adverts must have taken lessons from Nineteen Eighty-Four. As for London Transport's "Safe Under The Watchful Eyes" poster, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was created by a disgruntled designer intentionally alluding to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
    • The 4.2m figure comes from researchers taking a figure from one street and multiplying it by how many streets there are in the UK as a whole. Many streets are probably un-monitored or not as tightly monitored as the average town's high street. It's the same way that one researcher investigating the so-called "Burning Times" came up with the vastly exaggerated number of people allegedly burnt for witchcraft, which was later revealed to be shoddy methodology as she took an extreme case as the basis for her calculations. Plus research suggests that it does cut crime, mostly by deterrence - even academics in favour of stricter controls admit to that.
    • They have had an effect supposedly. Anecdotes from tourists indicate that taxi drivers are no longer willing to wait even as long as five minutes at a curb because the drivers have been fined for as much by bureaucrats reviewing footage.
    • Automatic Number-Plate Recognition capabilities have been built into a few static CCTV cameras in London, which then went on to provide a marvellous demonstration of why this trope tends to backfire in Real Life. Almost one in ten cars were showing up with some violation or other, mostly having no insurance or road tax, and there was no way to respond to even a fraction of them. Static ANPR cameras now trigger an alert to the dispatch office when they pick up a vehicle that's been reported stolen or in connection with another crime.
    • It should be noted as well that only London uses the Oyster Cards, London is one city in the UK.
  • Many countries in South-East Asia mandates that every one of the citizen carry an ID card. These came about out of paranoia in the 60s to weed out communist spies. It has since evolved into a double-edged sword where contracts cannot be forged without a copy of the ID card of both parties being present, providing an additional security layer against identity theft.
    • To a lesser extent, many other countries run identity card schemes, and the UK came close to having one before the Labour Party was ejected from government in 2010. In Poland, for example, in the early 2000s, this troper carried round her British passport as identity cards were routinely used and checked - for things as trivial as signing up to a video rental shop. In many ways, for people without photographic driving licenses, something other than a passport would be useful to have.
  • The NSA has long been the agency of choice for being behind any kind of Sinister Surveillance in fiction. In late 2013, this turned out to be Truth in Television when whistleblower Edward Snowden began releasing a steady stream of documents revealing that the NSA had, since the early 2000s, managed to compromise just about every communications channel on the planet, and was collecting petabytes of data on virtually every conversation or communication in the world.
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