In the “smart nation,” robot dogs enforce social distancing and an app can claim to neutralize racism. The reality is very different.

Is Palantir’s crystal ball just smoke and mirrors?

Every year eleven million people attend Magh Mela, a Hindu festival on the banks of the Ganges. The temporary infrastructure to support them includes hospitals and power stations, plus a massive surveillance apparatus.

“After receiving a trove of documents from the whistleblower, I found myself under surveillance and investigation by the U.S. government.”

Whenever the black dress came out, Jessica Weisman’s mother knew she was “going after the Jewish people again.”

When a longtime resident started stealing her neighbors’ Amazon packages, she entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance.

On Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

A daughter investigates her father’s belief that the government is subjecting him and thousands more to to mind control.

TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in a secret surveillance program.

“All human relations are a matter of record, ready to be revealed by a clever algorithm. Everyone is a spidergram now.”

Uncovering Baltimore’s secret aerial surveillance program.

Surveillance as daily life along the Texas border.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $1 trillion on national security. An investigation into whether it has worked.

Your local police department probably has a $400,00 device that listens in on cellphones. Soon your neighbor will be able to buy the same thing for $1,500.

After Daniel Rigmaiden was arrested for a multi-million dollar fraud, he didn’t argue that he was innocent. He wasn’t. But he couldn’t understand how he had been caught. Rigmaiden had covered his tracks meticulously — the only way the cops could’ve found him, he realized, was through some secret tracking device that they had never disclosed to the public.

Secrets, dangers, and murder in a German police state.

What happens when humans get superpowers.

A Profile Auditor goes sniffing after anomalies in the consumption habits and personal data of an unsuspecting hotel clerk.

"Through the Demosphere we fly, we men of the Database Maintenance Division, and although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos of the world who make it - every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the moment, in program B. When a schmo's paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by telecommuting we know about that too - the length of his coffee breaks and the size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there's a correlation."

On Singapore’s attempt to create a more harmonious society using mass surveillance and data analysis.

Dick Cheney and the political history of warrantless surveillance.

How and why the goverment pulled Silicon Valley into the war on terror.

Inside the N.S.A.’s mission to spy on just about everyone.

In which a narrator reflects, obsessively, about performance, surveillance, and secrecy.

"In art there is one condition that takes precedent over all others: to do things well. Which means I’ve got to be a good actor in a good drama: if I don’t do it well, there will be no effect, the show will fall into nothingness."

A profile of documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who last January received “a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key.”