In the post-9/11 atmosphere of ever-increasing government secrecy and surveillance, the real surprise to me about the Department of Justice
(admirably totted up by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in the 2010 Washington Post project Top Secret America and criticized by Glenn Greenwald and others).

But the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story. We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us. This has become immeasurably easier and more likely with the near-ubiquitous proliferation of high-quality recording devices. (As I learned after publishing this, the term had been coined earlier, and Cory Doctorow used it in 2007 for his book of the same name.)

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