Early this year, an uncrewed Chinese-operated high-altitude balloon floated across U.S. airspace, stoking anxiety and fascination among Americans, who assumed it was spying on them, and ultimately provoking President Biden to order the Pentagon to shoot it down. Just as alarming as foreign espionage, though, is the fear of information-gathering turned inward. American anxieties around the “surveillance state” have only grown since the Watergate scandal; with the post-9/11 passage of the USA PATRIOT Act; and with revelations that federal agencies sift through ordinary Americans’ phone and email communications, financial information, and Internet usage. Add in the rise of artificial intelligence, and our addictions to smartphones and sharing personal data, and pressing questions arise: Is Big Brother watching, and do we like it? What is the role of surveillance in our democracy, and to what ends do government and business use it? Does being watched keep us safe, or are we being snookered into becoming our own unwitting informants? What standards for digital privacy do we even want?

ArtCenter College of Design art and tech scholar Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Brennan Center government surveillance expert Faiza Patel, and ACLU SoCal attorney Mohammad Tajsar—experts working in and thinking deeply about surveillance and what it means for our 21st-century public and private lives—visit Zócalo for a timely discussion moderated by Ramesh Srinavasan, tech and society scholar at UCLA and director of the UC Digital Cultures Lab.

This discussion was co-presented by Zócalo Public Square, ACLU of Southern California, and The Progress Network.