LIVING IN THE SURVEILLANCE STATE ERA

We left our anonymity behind in the 20th century. The 21st century has become the Century of Surveillance and 20 years into it, governments have picked up all the tools of the trade to spy on their citizens effectively. They are joined by big corporations, Big Tech in particular, along with various spying agencies, hackers and other bad state actors

- Sunil Rajguru

At the turn of the century, when it came to technology, the whole world was consumed with the Y2K crisis or the Millennium Bug. Y2K stands for Year 2000 and it was felt that since computers only used the last two digits for the year, they wouldn’t be able to distinguish between 2000 and 1900, which would lead to grave errors. There could be pandemonium at the turn of the century. There were scares that computers would go bust, planes would go down, stock markets would crash etc. Some cults even predicted the end of the world. But we solved that problem without much fuss and India entered the path to becoming an It services superpower, getting a good chunk of the Y2K outsourcing market.

What really changed the world came a year later. The exact date being September 11, 2001, when the twin towers of the World trade Center in New York came down. 9/11 may have been a great geopolitical event, but it also led to the Patriot Act, which turned America into a surveillance state. The National security Agency (NSA) became all-powerful and it was just a matter of time before other countries and agencies followed suit.

The second factor was the rise of China as an It superpower and their use of tech to monitor citizens and streamline their activities effectively. Being a Communist country with no checks and balances, it was tech on steroids when compared to America. A credit score system was introduced. Facial recognition ensured that nobody could escape its reach. Artificial Intelligence became all-powerful. AI courts are gaining ground in China.

Stories of a surveillance state dystopia abound in literature and films, the first famous one being George Orwell’s