I was approached by The Quietus to write one of their Wreath Lectures this year. The result is this piece on our as yet fragmentary understanding of what the pervasive electronic surveillance activities of the US and UK as revealed by Edward Snowden means for all our futures.
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For picture editors, it’s been a tough six months. The door to Room 641a is just a door, but it may be one of the most pictured doors in news history. It forms the front cover of Mark Klein’s autobiography Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It. Wired magazine even have a slideshow of it, pictured from two angles. Similarly, after they got bored of running shots of the beautifully non-descript Snowden (no white-headed Julian Assange he), the picture desks at the newspapers brave enough to run his stories stuck with images of the doughnut-shaped GCHQ building in Gloucestershire, and the NSA’s mirrored box headquarters at Fort Meade.
This is important, because it indicates something deeper at play. Simply put, it means we – collectively, all of us, not just the Guardian‘s visual editors – cannot picture what the state of affairs as has now been revealed to us means. We don’t understand it. If this were a murder mystery, we’d be at the start, with nothing but the yellow-tape outline of a dead body to go by. We know where the crimes took place, but we don’t yet know why, or how to stop the killer from striking again.
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Read the full post here. The post draws from a panel I took part in for the wonderful Cybersalon in November.
The Barefoot Technologist 