Asymmetrical Surveillance

Bruce Schneier writes,

welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

I was strongly influenced by David Brin’s The Transparent Society, which envisioned a world where surveillance is symmetric: you can be watched by corporations and government, but in turn you can watch them. The current state, as described by Schneier, is asymmetrical.

My own view is that we need a new set of checks and balances for the 21st century. I articulated this about ten years ago in The Constitution of Surveillance. Comments on that essay would be welcome. However, please compare my proposals to the status quo or to alternative proposals, not to nirvana.