Über-surveillance

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I'm reading Charles Stross's "Empire Games", the first volume of the second Merchant Princes trilogy. We're in a 2020 New York, a world where Homeland Security has transformed America into a total surveillance state.

Hulius is a 'worldwalker', a terrorist to the American authorities, who is returning from a rendezvous with a NY agent-in-place.

"Entering the station, Hulius passed under the lenses of cameras on the staircase, of cameras fronting the ticket machines, of cameras watching the faces of everybody passing through the barriers, and, finally, of the cameras on the platform and on the subway train itself.

These cameras had just enough onboard intelligence to match faces against a database of persons of interest, and to call for help if they scored a hit. And, all unbeknownst to him, Hulius had become a person of interest. ...

Hulius was a person of interest because he'd been observed on numerous previous occasions and never identified. His face was known, his biometrics logged; but he was never associated with the same cell phone ID, or with RFID tags in an ID card (or the washing instruction labels in his clothing), or even with the same bicycle.

Hulius was a blind spot in the surveillance network's purview, like the 600-mile-per-hour moving hole in the radar reflection of a rain cloud that betrays the passage of a stealth bomber.

And as he walked toward the back of the platform for a train to Forest Hills, phones began to buzz."

This is the ultimate feature of total surveillance. If the system knows everybody, then the intruding agent need do nothing wrong, need not show any behavioural abnormalities. The systems shriek: 'there's a stranger in town!' .. and the forces of law and order begin to gather.

We're entering the age of human-level AI capabilities: competent cognitive functions which are obedient, don't get tired and are on duty 24/7. And replicable without limit, at low marginal cost. Cities, whole countries, become small villages which never sleep.

Exercise for the reader: how do you defeat a surveillance system this ubiquitous?

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1. Get a fake Id?

But the system is tracking you minute by minute. Any anomalies or unexplained gaps flag an alert. How do you ever leave your cover and get any useful agent-work done? It would be like cheating on God.

2. Subvert the System?

Like those thriller genius-kids who can break any password in seconds on a jury-rigged Ono-Sendai deck?

3. Your answer.

Yes, that's the one I'm interested in. Here's mine.