Living Life in Surveillance

We often imagine surveillance as something imposed by distant powers such as governments, intelligence agencies, technology giants. It sounds abstract, political and dramatic. But surveillance today is no longer exceptional. It is the background condition of ordinary life.

Cameras watch streets, offices, airports, lifts, and apartment corridors. They no longer merely record crimes; they record life. They observe how long you hesitate before entering a building, whom you meet in a parking lot, how often you glance over your shoulder. They note which product you lift in a supermarket and quietly put back on the shelf after reading the price tag.

Your phone knows where you sleep, where you eat, where you travel, and how often you visit the same place without admitting it even to yourself. Platforms remember what you search, like, scroll past, abandon mid-purchase, and secretly return to at midnight. Your watch tracks your heartbeat, sleep quality, stress level, and soon your mood swings. Your car reports how fast you accelerate, how sharply you brake, and whether you are an anxious driver or an aggressive one. Even silence or no action generates data because not actioning is also a choice that must be analysed.

Surveillance is no longer forced upon us. It is treated as convenience. We install it ourselves. We call it smart living. We do not feel watched; we feel assisted.

Governments justify this expansion in the language of security. Corporations justify it in the language of personalisation. Both insist on neutrality: data merely improves systems. But information is never neutral. Whoever sees more can predict more. Whoever predicts more can influence more. Power today intervenes before the event. We are no longer governed only by laws; we are managed by probabilities. Not what you did, but what you are likely to do. That is scary.

The deepest transformation is psychological. We know we are observed. And so, we adapt. We soften opinions online. We rewrite emails twice. We avoid jokes that could be misunderstood by people we will never meet. We begin to live as if our lives are permanently under review by invisible committees e.g., employers, algorithms, governments and even by the future versions of ourselves! Gradually, conscience is replaced by calculation. Not Is this right? but How will this look?

In India, allegations were made that Pegasus, an Israeli military-grade spyware, was used to infiltrate the phones of opposition politicians, journalists, and activists. Once implanted, a phone becomes silent informant such as messages, calls, camera, microphone, location all accessible without the user knowing. The device continues to function normally while silently reporting its owner’s life.

What made the episode disturbing was not merely the technology, but its implications. If true, it meant that personal phones had become political instruments. Private conversations, strategy discussions, even family interactions could be observed invisibly. The boundary between national security and political advantage became blurred.

The deeper lesson is this: surveillance no longer requires mass monitoring of crowds. It operates through surgical precision. A handful of infected devices can reveal entire networks of relationships and decision-making structures. Power no longer needs to watch everyone. It only needs to watch the right people.

We no longer live in a world where privacy is the default and surveillance the exception. We live in a world where connectivity itself has become the vulnerability. The very devices that organise our lives can be repurposed to map them completely.

Some now speak of revolting against surveillance by retreating from technology itself. They replace smartphones with feature phones. They abandon social media. They pay in cash. They switch off location services. They cover laptop cameras. They refuse smart homes, smart cars, and smart watches. They attempt to live analog lives inside a digital world. It is a modern form of civil disobedience, not against laws, but against visibility. Yet even this rebellion is partial and symbolic. Your data trail already exists. Your financial history, biometric records, travel logs, education files, medical scans, and online traces have long been copied, merged, and profiled. You can stop producing new data, but you cannot erase the old. The map of you has already been drawn. In trying to disappear, you only confirm how visible you once were. Surveillance no longer needs your cooperation. Your identity has been permanently externalized. What remains deeply personal is shrinking, not because you surrendered it carelessly, but because the world quietly learned to take it systematically.

What makes this era especially complex is that surveillance increasingly presents itself as care. Nowhere is this clearer than in medicine.

Imagine being told that your cancer risk is high and that the safest option is a full-body MRI every three months. Clinically rational. Early detection saves lives. No responsible doctor would argue otherwise.

Yet something deeper changes.

You are not ill. But you are no longer simply healthy. Life becomes a sequence of scans. Each quarter of the year feels like an audit of your body. You live between reports. The future is not lived; it is monitored.

This is surveillance at its most intimate. Here, your own cells become objects of observation. You live free yet permanently assessed.

This is the condition of modern society. We are not criminals. We are not guilty. We are simply under continuous evaluation – financially, socially, digitally and biologically.

We live inside a system that always watches, always records, always remembers.

It was after this reflection that I shared my unease with the Professor.

He listened patiently and then smiled.

“Dr Modak,” he said, sipping his coffee, “you speak as if surveillance is a modern invention.”

I asked what he meant.

“Chitragupta,” he replied.

The celestial record-keeper.

The divine auditor.

The cosmic compliance officer.

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(Incidentally, those of you who don’t know – in ancient Indian mythology, Chitragupta, son of Lord Brahma, is the scribe who records all actions of every human being. These records are reviewed by Yama for judging the soul after death.

It is said that Yama would become confused sometimes when dead souls would come to him, and would occasionally send the souls to either heaven or hell wrongly. Lord Brahma, determined to solve this problem sat in meditation for thousands of years. Finally, when he opened his eyes, Chitragupta stood before him. Chitragupta, sometimes referred to as the first man to use letters, is known to be incredibly meticulous, and with his pen and paper tracks every action (good or bad) of every sentient life form. These perfect and complete documents are referred to in mystical traditions as the “Akashic” records. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitragupta)

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“Chitragupta has been running the longest surveillance operation in human history,” the Professor continued calmly. “Every thought. Every action. Every intention. Logged perfectly. No system failure. Built in blockchain. No right to be forgotten. Final assessment at death.”

He paused.

“The real question is whether we can remain human in a world that measures everything; our steps, clicks, heartbeats, purchases, and preferences and yet understands nothing about the soul.

Today, we are becoming obsessively precise about the visible and dangerously careless about the invisible. What may truly matter then is the accounting of our conscience, empathy we showed to others and morals we stood by. This accounting cannot be captured by algorithms.”

The real tragedy is that we think so little about what our own record of good and bad may look like at the time of our final reckoning. And we forget that all of us are under a continuous invisible divine surveillance.

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