The next step—of distributed sensing and rapid data analysis and dissemination—will certainly up the ante in just about every conceivable way. But it needn't lead inevitably to Big Brother-style repression. Brin and like-minded thinkers, such as those who post their opinions at Universaltransparency.org, argue that so long as we the people own most of the eyes, we will be able to debate privacy issues knowledgeably among ourselves, with the aim of shaping public policy for the collective good. It is a monopoly of vision that we need to fear, say the transparency advocates, not vision itself.

Getting To Tomorrow's Fishbowl Worls—where we swim in perpetually refreshed pools of information about ourselves and one another—will take time. Today, every new monitoring or data-gathering initiative launched by governments or corporations prompts dire warnings from activist groups about how we're heading straight toward Orwell's terrifying dystopia.

One of the hottest of hot-button issues, for now at least, is public surveillance cameras. They're popping up all over Singapore, Russia, and Great Britain, which now has an estimated four million police video cameras on public streets, up from fewer than 150 000 just 10 years ago [see photo, "Guardian Angels"].

Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth

Guardian Angels:: British police officers in the control room at New Scotland Yard in London watch over monitors showing closed-circuit TV images and newscasts during a state visit by U.S. President George W. Bush in November 2003.

In comparison, the spread of video cameras aimed at U.S. citizens has been almost inconspicuous because most of the cameras are owned and operated by individuals and companies—banks, stores, building operators, and so on. And unlike their counterparts in Great Britain, U.S. law enforcement officials rely heavily on these privately owned security monitors. The Oklahoma City bomber and the Washington, D.C., snipers were caught partly because of video footage obtained from unofficial sources.

Nevertheless, privacy advocates regularly portray the rise in video surveillance darkly, predicting that it is eliminating our privacy and undermining our values. They're right about the loss of privacy, of course. But balancing that imposition are the ways in which the new technologies can be used to promote our values even as they protect us. For example, it has been 13 years since an amateur videographer taped Los Angeles cops beating the daylights out of motorist Rodney King in 1991. Since then, countless other pieces of video have been used to solve crimes, expose government abuses, and promote democratic revolutions from Russia to the Philippines.

The latest, most dramatic example was the debacle in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The grisly details of prisoner maltreatment there became a matter of public record, or at least many of them did, just months after most of the abuses occurred. Never before has a program of prisoner abuse been so minutely detailed. The difference this time was the existence of digital cameras and an easy way of distributing their images. Many of the cameras were operated by the soldier-jailers themselves, some of whom could not stop themselves from sharing snapshots of their twisted escapades with friends via e-mail.

The pictures' subsequent exposure on network television and in print—and near-instantaneous global distribution on the Internet—turned the tables on the jailers, and prompted people to start asking tough questions about policy decisions and implementation throughout the U.S. military's chain of command. It was a textbook example of what usually happens when you have scattered sensors and a facile, fast means of spreading their output—enough of the data gets out to start the wheels of justice turning.

Public Video Monitoring Isn't All that bothers privacy activists. At least as disturbing to them are federal programs aimed at expanding government monitoring and data collection.

In the United States, various agencies have been hard at work writing highly sophisticated programs that sift through databases or sample the flood of e-mail traffic passing through Internet hubs, searching for word patterns and other cues that might help detect threats to national interests. When the media spotlight fell on a few of these agencies, they didn't end their efforts; typically, they became more secretive.