According to Wikipedia:

Surveillance is the monitoring of behaviour, activities, or information for the purpose of influencing, managing or directing.

It is by no means a new concept, as the ability to know what your population is doing at any given time is extremely useful when trying to enforce laws. This is why even in the Bible, there are examples of what is thought to be surveillance:

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.”

2 Samuel 11-12

Later in the passage, David goes on to sleep with Bathseba, even though she was already the wife of Uriah. Cleary, in this example, surveillance was used for David’s own personal gain and pleasure rather than for the greater good.

There is even evidence to believe that the ancient Egyptians were using forms of surveillance, according to Terry Crowdy in his book The Enemy Within: A History of Espionage.

The Hittite king Muwatallis sent two spies into the Egyptian camp posing as deserters to convince pharaoh that the Hittite army was still quite distant. Rameses believed their story and unwittingly allowed part of his army to march into a Hittite ambush.

However this is not the same form of surveillance that we are used to today. David was not using CCTV to spy upon Bathseba, nor was Muwatallis when he sent spies to the Rameses.

If we want to figure out how long mass surveillance (as we understand it today) has been going on, we only need to look back to the 2000’s, and we know that the first CCTV was only used in 1927. We can even study the use of surveillance in Nazi and Communist regimes, but if surveillance is such a new concept then how do we explain the use of spies in Egypt or David in the Bible.

This then begs the question as how we define surveillance? If we use the definition at the beginning of this article then both of these cases count. However if both of these cases count, then why are some of us fine with our country spying, and yet not with the use of security cameras?

I think it comes down to a very human instinct. We don’t really notice if something bad is happening to someone else if it doesn’t affect us, it is only when it does that we take a stand.

I think the poem by Martin Niemöller sums it up well:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

So where did surveillance originate? It’s hard to tell. The issue has now become much more prominent thanks to works such as Orwell’s 1984 or Ed Snowden’s revealing of the NSA’s spying capabilities and the constant articles about Facebook and Google’s abusive privacy policies.

I think it is fair to say that the act of watching and monitoring others has been going on for longer than we can prove, it’s only recently that we’ve started to record it.

A lot of companies advertise their encryption of data. Encryption is a good practice for privacy and security but it’s worthless sometimes. For example, WhatsApp encrypts messages but it’s worthless as it’s Facebook (WhatsApp’s owner) who creates and manages the keys.

What a secure messenger or any service should do is to let the user create and handle encryption keys. Let me give you another example. Imagine you want to send a letter to a friend and I’m the mail person. You give me your letter and I promise you to hide it. Now, I may hide it from other people but I still have access to it.

Encryption is like that. If you want to hide your letter, you should do it yourself and not trust anyone. As long as other services do the encryption for you or manage your keys, you’re not truly secure and that encryption is worthless.

It’s a reply to “Wanna try Jitsi Meet?” by Paulo Pinto.

I believe referring to a free software as an alternative to a proprietary software is not right. Most free software are not created to replace something. They have been created to satisfy a need for a service or software and are licensed free (as in freedom) to respect users’ rights.

I wouldn’t refer to a software as an alternative to another software, unless the creators specifically mention it.

There’s a lot of reports that some web sites are blocking users’ access if they are on private browsing mode. One of these web sites is The Washington Post, who chose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its motto. It’s very funny that the very news agency that claims to fight for democracy and freedom is tracking its users and collects their personal information.

If you visit The Washington Post web site with private mode activated on your browser, you’ll see such notice:

We noticed you’re browsing in private mode.

Private browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers. Turn off private browsing to keep reading this story, or subscribe to use this feature, plus get unlimited digital access.

I do support asking for subscription or limiting the amount of articles a user can read on free plan but limiting people from using private mode is not acceptable. The point of private browsing is to not being recognized nor  followed.

This is actually much more worrying that this is a bug from browsers. A browser should not let websites know if a user is browsing web in private mode. Not being tracked should not be a luxury. A user should be in private browsing mode by default and if they wanted, they can turn it off.

Tracking people in private mode should be considered as a violation of people’s privacy and browsers should be forced to put more effort to make private browsing much more safer and easier for users.