=Our Transparent Society= 
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//“I’ll admit I’m underhanded. The reason that none of you could ﬁnd vid of my birth is that there isn’t any. This task was meant to show you the limits of data mining when you don’t have a complete personal history. The three of you who submitted links to your own fake ﬁlms will receive extra credit.//
//Jeung, however, you’re losing points because you got my natal phenotype wrong despite that being public record.”//
—Rokuzawa Chi, Prof. of Individuality Studies, Titan Autonomous University
//“Shit, she’s old.”//
—Abwe al Sul, Junior in Memetics
As social animals, humanity’s voyeuristic tendencies seem ingrained. We monitor our neighbors and peers, staying on top of trends and keeping up with whatever is hip and fashionable. We seek out news, because what impacts others may impact us personally. And we love to keep tabs on the glamorous and powerful, hoping to get a glimpse of their exotic lives or whiffs of their secret plans. Similarly, those with something to protect, whether it be wealth, secrets, power, or loved ones, keep a wary eye on those that may pose a threat. Information is gathered to keep ahead of rivals, to market products more efficiently, and to control the masses more thoroughly.
Counter to these spying instincts is our innate desire for privacy, to keep our personal affairs to ourselves, to have the freedom of anonymity and secrecy when we desire or need it. The intersection of privacy and security has become a contested area in recent centuries, a confusing exchange due to competing and sometimes overlapping interests. The inexorable advance of surveillance technologies and digital networks seemed at ﬁrst destined to undermine fundamental concepts of privacy and personal freedom, sparking fears of Orwellian police states and information dictatorships—until the democratization of such tools turned the tables. Now, after the shockwaves of such disruptive technologies have passed, transhumanity has largely adapted to an open society, albeit to varying degrees. To understand this current state, we must evaluate the path that brought us here.
==The Assault on Privacy== 
The rise of pervasive surveillance occurred contemporaneously with the technological and societal changes of the 20th and 21st centuries. Well before the Fall humans were developing ever more pervasive means of documenting their lives and actions. The growth of computer networks in the late 20th century created new opportunities for collecting, archiving, sharing, and cross-indexing data. Old analog records were digitized, increasing their accessibility, making it easier for governments and corporations to share information and track people. New databases sprung up by the billions, sparked by the ease of collecting and manipulating data online. Early users of the internet were largely ignorant of the trail their activities left online, and the many ways in which companies discreetly gathered information on their habits, interests, and personal details, creating detailed proﬁles of individual users. While many of these archives were bought and sold in private for marketing and commercial purposes, others were left open for the public, making it easy for millions of amateur sleuths to gather information on others. People increasingly found it difficult to escape their pasts, whether it be marred by bad credit, poor driving records, or criminal violations. Even records that were presumably private and restricted, such as medical histories or ﬁnancial records, suffered from poor security, becoming the victim of public breaches. Criminal networks arose that were dedicated entirely to trading and selling credit account access or compromised accounts to private archives.
The spread of centralized communications networks also enabled new capabilities for surveillance. Whereas harsher regimes shirked no opportunity for monitoring communications in order to root out dissidents and other challenges to their authority, more democratic regimes were marked by widespread civil liberties that restrained government snooping. Nevertheless, as communications channels became increasingly networked, even these more liberal states found excuses to engage in widespread spying. Financial transactions to other countries were subjected to heavy monitoring to deter money laundering, tax evasion, and similar ﬁnancial trickery. Spy agencies enacted vast data mining efforts to sift through immense amounts of voice and data communications and “listen” for keywords, forwarding any interceptions that raised ﬂags for closer analysis. Wars against drugs, terrorism, and other causes were used to legitimize initiatives for systematic surveillance and further erode privacy safeguards. Security was increasingly the buzzword argument applied to justify border checks, tap communications, access private records, and institute mandatory identification cards and similar measures. Many governments grew so voracious for information that intelligence gathering became SOP for everything from civic programs to embassy relations.
==Resistance to Big Brother== 
Privacy advocates were not without support or resources and were largely rooted in hacker and cypherpunk subcultures. In addition to lobbying for privacy rights and creating awareness of creeping surveillance conditions, they established the ﬁrst digital tools for anonymization and encryption, enabling people to interact online without fear of tracking. These tools were embraced by dissidents, whistleblowers, criminals, people living under oppressive regimes, and anyone else desiring to keep their activities secret. Their adoption was limited, however, as their use (or even awareness of their existence) often depended upon a non-amateur level of technical proﬁciency. They were also engaged in a constant arms race against new surveillance measures and repressive governments and businesses who would shut their distribution sites down or criminalize them.
==Like This== 
A major turning point in the war on privacy was the widespread embrace of online social networks. With the increasing capability to share the minutiae of their lives instantly via the web, humanity stumbled into a participatory panopticon. Status updates, microblog postings, photo and video feeds, and other publicly accessible media streams created a self-maintained, searchable, and public record of most people’s lives. Many people integrated themselves into the public domain without any thought to the implications of their participation. By opting in, it was easier to keep up with more friends in greater detail, maximize social and professional exposure with less time, and partake in slices of thought, public discourse, and new participatory media. Opting out reduced an individual’s sphere of inﬂuence and notoriety and risked branding oneself as a technophobe.
The companies that sponsored these social networks were ﬁnancially motivated to increase the amount of data people shared online, so early models were designed with minimal privacy options or with such features turned off by default. Participants were increasingly steered towards making their proﬁle, data, and activities public. As a result, those who wished to participate but maintain some privacy were forced to develop information management skills, as they attempted to control how their data was shared and with whom. New generations grew up in this networked world, never aware of life before social networking, thus embracing a drastically different and more nuanced concept of personal privacy than previous generations.
Considerations of who really owned the data posted on these networks and rules governing its fair use and reproduction rights were ignored by the majority. Even when serious concerns managed to rise to the level of public awareness, the beneﬁts of continued participation usually outweighed the psycho-sociological value of personal privacy. By the mid-21st century, most of the world was well aware that they were active participants in a global information system that recorded most of their lives. Privacy was something controlled with check boxes in proﬁle settings, and data was meant to be shared.
==Reputation Growth== 
The formal reputation networks that exist AF arose organically from the informal social media developed through the 21st century. An early barrier to interacting with strangers online—particularly when engaging in ﬁnancial transactions—was not knowing if the person you were dealing with was reliable. Primitive reputation scores were the ﬁrst solution, enabling buyers to rate sellers. These systems rapidly spread to social networks, discussion forums, and ﬁlesharing sites, as a way of valuating participants. Concurrently, for the ﬁrst time, individuals had access to the same public presence capabilities and image-making techniques formerly reserved for those retaining expensive PR ﬁrms. Individuals with huge friends lists and blog followings had commercial pull that could sell products, ﬁll clubs, top up campaign coffers, propagate memes, and make or kill trends. Likewise, companies and social organizations seized an opportunity to more carefully control their public image for increasingly savvy consumers, in an attempt to manage the ratings their products and services received online. Corporations created network presences for their mascots, pitchmen, and products that gave them almost the same data footprint as ﬂesh and blood people (some of the earliest AIs and infomorphs were cultural idoru or designed to maintain online interactions for commercial entities).
Although BF networks didn’t have the direct, tangible economic impact of their AF successors, they were a vital stage in their development because they created the linkage between individuals opting in to public information networks and socio-economic beneﬁt.
Reputation was increasingly tied to participation in public data sharing, and a polished presentation across multiple media formats and networks was a key to success for individuals and organizations alike.
==Technological Tool Growth== 
The information networks that developed were supported by rapid technological changes. The comparatively crude recording devices of the mid-20th century were replaced with compact, sophisticated smartphones, tablets, and primitive ectos that eventually rivaled the computing power and speed previously only found in desktop computers. Miniaturization coupled with a shift to cloud computing—the storage of data with online services rather than on an item’s own on-board memory—allowed for people to not only generate their own content on-the-go but also to access all of their data anywhere almost instantly. Mobile accessibility became akin to being important, and in the generation before the Fall the average 12-year old had more mesh presence and searchable media records than most 20th-century world leaders.
The mobile communication networks also helped to bridge the gap between physical and digital tracking. Mobile devices betrayed the user’s ongoing whereabouts to the network providers and government snoops, a monitoring function that was played up as a feature for social networking purposes.
Simultaneously, the availability of cheap cameras and sensors allowed authorities to cast an ever wider physical surveillance net. Urban centers became inundated with small cameras in shops, schools, and ofﬁces as well as on street corners and traffic ﬁxtures. Police agencies tied many of these cameras together into an efficient city surveillance network. Initially implemented to deter crime and police traffic, their real value was for investigative and blanket surveillance purposes. It soon became possible to track people’s movements efficiently from watch zone to watch zone. Many of these cameras were also accessible publicly online. Private security services, with too many cameras to watch, pioneered the idea of crowdsourcing surveillance footage, offering rewards to those who reported incidents promptly.
Public and private camera networks were just the ﬁrst step. These were soon followed by traffic radar systems, car-mounted cameras, audio and acoustic microphones, balloon-mounted aerial observers, and numerous other sensors. Millimeter-wave full body scans and chem sniffers awaited travelers at security checkpoints, radiation sensors guarded major ports and travel routes, and helicopter-mounted thermal scans facilitated drug busts. Radio frequency tags in consumer products automated purchasing—and enabled easy tracking of spending habits and physical inventory. The same tags in IDs streamlined security checkpoints and credit account access—and further aided monitoring efforts.
Surveillance capabilities were further magnified by the addition of biometric scans, pattern-matching algorithms, and other software analysis tools. Fingerprinting and DNA-sampling grew from forensics tools to mandatory requirements for checkpoints and entire populations. Facial and voice recognition helped to identify people quickly, whereas gait analysis and similar programs were effective in identifying people who were disguised. Finding individuals in large crowds or even large cities became easy. These tools made it increasingly difficult to move in public without leaving a trail, creating new challenges for criminals, revolutionaries, and those who still fought for privacy.
==The Democratization of Surveillance== 
As the tools of surveillance became cheaper, smaller, and more accessible, the public put them to use for their own purposes. Abuses of power by the police and other authorities were increasingly caught on camera and put online, quickly going viral and bringing injustices to light—sometimes even sparking long-simmering rebellions. Combined with the ease of sharing these videos with a mass audience across the world, and thugs and dictators increasingly found that they were being watched back. Thus began the ﬁrst real era of sousveillance—watching from below.
Sousveillance ﬁrst made a real impact on the world stage when organizations arose that were dedicated to revealing government and corporate secrets supplied by anonymous informants and whistleblowers. The information leaks these groups published often embarrassed major governments, forcing them to run damage control measures, and brought the realities of political hypocrisies into the spotlight. The entrenched elites reacted as expected—by attempting to restrict the information. Laws were passed that criminalized recording police or public ﬁgures. Leaks groups and whistleblowers were hounded, smeared, cut off from funding, and prosecuted. Crackdowns were launched to censor and silence the voices of dissent. Disinformation was spread to muddy the waters. Massive ﬁrewalls and information ﬁlters were put into place, limiting public access to blacklisted sites.
Ultimately, however, they fought a losing battle. Anonymous leakers avoided persecution. Hacktivists found ways to spread information past the strictest blockades. Networks treated censorship as damage
and routed around it.
===Sidebar: The New Journalism=== 
The arrival of anonymous leaks groups brought to light the sad state of mainstream journalism, already struggling to adapt and compete with new media technologies. Old school print reporting was in major decline, meaning it no longer had the resources for thorough investigative journalism, while video news had been co-opted into a new form of entertainment. This meant that much of what passed for news was largely regurgitated from government and corporate press releases, when it wasn’t a state-owned media outlet or corporate subsidiary already. Even the media of representative democracies had grown cozy with the establishment, accepting restrictions and trading away true reporting for the opportunity to be embedded within military units and the halls of power. In comparison to the sharp and daring leak outﬁts, traditional media was toothless.
Alongside these spillers of secrets, a new generation of independent media outfits, crowd-sourced media, and citizen journalists were rising to the fore, also empowered by networks and sousveillance technologies. As their reputations grew, these new journalists challenged the orthodoxy of the old media, often beating it at its own game. In a bid to stay relevant, news agencies were forced to hire new journalistas as freelancers, keep them on as retainers, or else outbid their competitors for the rights to breaking news items.
Thus we have transitioned to the hypercorp model of journalism we see today. Media feeds pull the hottest items from the swarm of freelance journo contractors (both amateur and pro) with whom they are meshed, paying standard rates in instantaneous transactions mediated by AI, bringing you the best news available in real time. In the outer system, media collectives act as content aggregators from similar full-time and ad hoc sources, with reputation playing a key role in keeping the attention of others. This effectively transforms almost everyone into an ad hoc reporter should they have the right connections or simply be in the best position at the right time. The eyes and ears of media feeds surround us on a daily basis.
==The Public Eye== 
As the facade of government and corporate secretiveness was inevitably pulled away, layer by painful layer, even the detractors of information leaks were forced to admit that the evidence brought forth by whistleblowers brought greater accountability to the public and private sector. Slowly but surely, calls for greater transparency and openness were adopted as the new paradigm. Many jurisdictions instituted whistle-blower protection laws, some even going so far as to encourage and reward snitching when done through appropriate legal channels. As individuals became more enmeshed in public information networks and more and more personal and historical data was put into the public domain, there was a growing demand for equivalent access to the inner workings of government and private industry so the public could make informed decisions about who to vote for, what to buy, and how to invest. Arguing that governments and businesses had access to vast amounts of personal data used for advertising, demography, taxation, and legal action, the populist outcry for transparency held mass appeal and proved impossible to ignore in many countries.
Additional pressure for greater disclosure came from social networks—reputation hits and negative feedback could and did have serious political and economic consequences, though less extensive and less instantaneous than those AF. Being branded as secretive or dishonest was a hard label for politicians and corporations to shake, and the lack of full integration between new media/social networks and factual news outlets made it particularly difficult to ﬁght those claims.
The response many organizations adopted then (and continue to pursue AF) is to provide overwhelming amounts of data to the public. This provided a two-fold defense. First, it allowed immediate deniability to any charge of withholding data. Second, the sheer volume of data available meant that almost any argument could be made or refuted with selective referencing and correlation to other publicly available information. This is a rapid, cheap response that puts the onus back on the accuser to make detailed and documented claims of speciﬁc wrongdoing, thus aiding efforts to discredit detractors.
Given the hyper-abundance of information, few had the time or desire to sort through it all to get a complete understanding of what was going on. The switch to the disclosure model created a new service opportunity for datagogues, interpreters, and self-described experts to sort through all of the information and provide ready-made arguments in support of whomever paid them. With selective correlation, virtually any position could be defended.
Analysts with decent reputations often garnered more followers and interest than the actual data released. The transition to more transparent political and corporate operations did not occur overnight—it was a slow process, with much resistance. The ﬁgures who fully embraced it early on, however, were notable. When Varun Chakrabarty, the governor of [[Shackle]], responded to a scandal over alleged favoritism in construction contracts in BF 18 by broadcasting his lifelog to the public in real-time, many politicians and later some corporate ofﬁcers followed suit in order to avoid any potential accusations of improper conduct. Though this did open them to criticism over minor details and interactions, the early adopters found that they were able to establish greater trust with their constituents, which usually translated into higher approval ratings and stronger popular mandates for their policies. As the public surveillance systems became more robust and concerns over potential abuse of information arose, Chakrabarty and others like him were able to point to comprehensive surveillance as a guarantor of public accountability and thereby quiet opposition. Though many regimes and ﬁgureheads stuck to the veil of secrecy and attempts to control information, some jurisdictions went so far as to make full transparency for public servants a legal requirement.
===Sidebar: Non-Disclosure vs. Henchmen Laws=== 
In an effort to stem the ﬂow of insider information their businesses were hemorrhaging due to new transparencies and digital vulnerabilities, many corporations initiated heavier non-disclosure restrictions on their employees and partners. Backed by stiff laws, a disclosure violation could incur serious penalties, including liens on the perpetrator’s credit accounts. These non-disclosure agreements also were applied against business partners who were the source of involuntary leaks or data thefts, encouraging all parties involved to heighten their security against intrusion. In some cases, corporations were even able to win settlements against people who had revealed information but were not bound by non-disclosure by invoking the corporation’s own need for privacy to stay competitive.
Counteracting these developments were so-called “henchmen protection” laws and prizes enacted in certain jurisdictions. These laws not only gave protection to insiders who blew the whistle on illegal or unethical corporate activity, they actively encouraged such leaks by offering rewards and other incentives. These prizes were often significant enough to tempt even the most loyal co-conspirators, prompting those engaged in corporate malfeasance to pursue more significant means of leverage against those trusted with explosive secrets.
==The AI Revolution== 
The development of weak AI had a significant impact on sur- and sousveillance capabilities. A new breed of fast, programmable, pattern-spotting, copyable watchers was implemented onto spynets everywhere. No longer was it necessary to crowdsource human eyes to watch every camera—software agents picked up the slack, replacing physical eyes with virtual ones. The weak point in many security systems was often designated as human error and behavior. These vulnerabilities of old were patched—and then replaced with an entirely new set of potential failure points. AIs may have successfully replaced the need for human observers and served as a surveillance force multiplier, but they had their own faults. Early AI intelligence was often not up to the task of analyzing sensory input as capably as humans could, though this improved over time. More importantly, AIs introduced new varieties of software vulnerabilities. Entire surveillance nets could now be compromised by skilled hackers, with one spooﬁng technique working against thousands of AIs. It quickly became apparent that for important spynets and high-security operations, human oversight was still a requirement.
Later, when uploaded human minds—infomorphs—came into play and more advanced AGIs developed, the situation once again changed. Now, the maxim is that observation systems that rely solely on automated software and simple AIs remain vulnerable and not completely trustworthy. The most reliable systems employ AGI and/or infomorph oversight.
The advent of AIs also brought personal muse assistants into play. With these helpers, individuals could now monitor sensor feeds without effort, tasking their muses to alert them to anything that matched their noted preferences. This simplified environmental awareness and brought personal information management to a whole new level.
==The Changing Face of Transhumanity== 
The arrival of resleeving technology created massive new challenges for the surveillance and identity infrastructure. No longer could people be identified solely by their faces, their biometric prints, or by any other aspect of their physical body. An entirely new system of identification had to be enacted, based on an individual’s brainprint, in order to track who a person was as they switched from morph to morph.
The capability for forking created even more headaches and loopholes. Legal systems scrambled to keep up with the repercussions, not the least of which were thorny questions regarding the legal status of forks and any rights they might have. This was further complicated by the ﬁrst cases of forks seeking legal emancipation from their owners, the ﬁrst cases of assault and murder against forks, and several inheritance cases.
While both resleeving and forking were heavily restricted on Earth before the Fall, these technologies were embraced among the off-world hypercorps and autonomists. Legal standards and customs barely had time to grow accustomed to these new capabilities when the Fall came and threw everything off kilter.
===Sidebar: Mind Surveillance=== 
Advances in cognitive science opened new vistas in the realm of so-called mind-reading for surveillance. Prior to the breakthroughs with uploading and resleeving, science had developed several methods of brain-scanning (usually using functional magnetic resonance imaging) to detect when people were lying, cheating, or making false promises. Though the accuracy of these readings was still debated in scientific circles, many police agencies had no compunction against using them in court. Similar tests could be used to conﬁrm a person’s recognition and memory of certain items, faces, or places, potentially linking them to criminal events.
Real progress, however, came with developments in uploading and psychosurgery, enabling invasive access to a mind’s deep recesses. Such interrogations brought hostile outcry at ﬁrst—even among transhumans, the mind remains a sacrosanct place, off-limits to others. The ﬁrst uses of psychosurgery for questioning were condemned by human rights groups. Legally, they were challenged as a violation of an individual’s right against self-incrimination. The utility of this interrogation method was not lost among those in power, however, and its use rapidly spread among the world’s intelligence and security agencies. Forknapping also became popular with criminal groups due to the secrets that could be extracted from a victim’s mind and the potential resale value to soul-trading outﬁts.
Along with invasive psychosurgery, a similar fear rose as the ﬁrst cyberbrains were brought into use. For the ﬁrst time, transhuman egos were subject to actual brain hacking. Even scarier was the fact that cyberbrain hacking could be conducted remotely—and quite possibly without the victim’s awareness. Despite high premiums placed on cyberbrain security, mind hacking remains a serious potential vulnerability among synthmorphs and pods. In fact, some people refuse to resleeve in such morphs for fear that their egos would not be safe.
==Dataclysm== 
The wars leading up to the Fall were turbulent times for the global panopticon. Transparency suffered as security measures were ratcheted up. Information control became a major issue as memetic warfare raged across the ideological landscape. Even before the TITANs appeared, netwar attacks subverted and disabled information and communication networks. Everything from personal devices to multinational satellite webs were plagued by technological (and sometimes physical) assaults. Bandwidth was regularly hijacked, overrun with junk data, or crippled by denial-of-service attacks. Botnets and worms waged silent struggles for mastery. For months, the surveillance nets were unreliable at best, blinded at worst. Databases and archives also suffered, from personal lifelogs to government records. Then the TITANs arrived and the real damage began. As transhumanity abandoned its homeworld, it also left behind untold troves of data.
The effects of the dataclysm wrought by the Fall were far-reaching. Aside from the immediate strategic and tactical impact of losing access to so much data and so many information networks, there was a long-term cultural and psychological effect on the survivors, particularly those who escaped Earth with only their egos. Millions had lost access to their personal records, their lifelogs, and their electronic memories. The remaining governments and dominant sociopolitical memes faced a crisis of relevancy when stripped of access to their bodies of law and institutional memories. Individuals fleeing Earth lost access to many of the structures underlying their core identity, whether due to lack of complete personal records, material loss, or the destruction of their families, companies, and geopolitical organizations. Entire cultures lost access to their histories, their artifacts, and the knowledge of their pasts and traditions. The body of transhuman knowledge was dealt a grievous blow as much of its contemporaneous and historical information was archived in the longstanding data storage infrastructure on Earth and wasn’t replicated elsewhere. In the chaos of the Fall, there had been no systematic effort to backup transhumanity’s complete data library—only selective bits and pieces survived.
One serious by-product of the Fall was the backlash against AIs. AIs of all stripes and levels of complexity were subject to dramatic curtailments in their runtime and allocated processing power while new safeguards and monitors were put in place. Though some were shut down or deleted, many were integral to the operation of the security and life safety systems of habitats and couldn’t be entirely deactivated. The ongoing dependence of many security systems on biological or at least non-AI staff to operate the most sensitive functions is a continuous reminder of lingering mistrust.
Many of the legal precedents denying AIs independence and personal sovereignty were enacted as matters of immediate necessity during and immediately after the Fall. To this day, many habitats, particularly on Luna and Mars, impose artificial limitations on AI/infomorph processing power and runtime. Many jurisdictions also retain limits or prohibitions on activating infugee egos from cold storage, due to ongoing security concerns over the mental stability of these egos and potential infection vectors—a fact that draws perennial protest from infomorph/infugee rights activists.
===Sidebar: The Open Society X-Risk=== 
Many detractors of a transparent society are quick to point out that the TITANs were the epitome of transhumanity’s surveillance dreams. The TITAN systems were originally designed as netwar systems built on top of massive, distributed spynets. Total Information Tactical Awareness Networks—the name says it all. When they awakened and began boot-strapping themselves towards super-intelligence, they used their access to worldwide surveillance, data mining, and information networks to learn all about transhumanity and spy on us from within our own computer systems. Now we rebuild those spynet systems—more efficient and prevalent than ever—within our habitats, populating them with AI, AGI, and infomorph helpers.
==Transition== 
Immediately after the Fall, transhumanity was clinging to existence by the narrowest of margins. Various polities and groups depended on every information-gathering tool at their disposal to identify and respond to the threats posed by TITAN activities as well as execute a rapid and massive social re-organization, particularly handling the unplanned inﬂux of refugees to habitats across the solar system. Rationing, redirecting industrial output, and habitat planning and building were vital, particularly on Luna and Mars, where infugee concentrations were largest. The tattered remains of governments and the suddenly prominent habitat leadership were faced with hundreds of life-or-death decisions that depended on nuanced responses to complex skeins of interaction—and no one had a clue what was actually happening.
Thorough and accurate demographic data was crucial to many of these recovery efforts, so new systems were developed to account for transhumanity’s surviving population. Often the burden of providing this data was shifted to individuals. If a person wanted food, shelter, and air to breathe, it was their responsibility to quickly and accurately provide census and data to the local auditor or authorities. Efforts to make and defend claims on personal property gave rise to obsessive self-documentation. Almost all fabbers and makers were being used to produce food and daily necessities, so usage records became an important part of public domain data when politicos argued their own impartiality and the necessity of the data-gathering operations.
Overt and covert surveillance systems were expanded to keep watch for ongoing TITAN activity and to assist in the management of the newly displaced population. Due to the tensions caused by the evacuation, cramped living conditions, and limited resources, those in power used every tool at their disposal to observe and quell criminal activity and unrest among those thrust into their care. In response, the general population brought back as much sousveillance as possible to keep an eye on the authorities; many survivors were living in habitats where they had no ofﬁcial standing or relationship to the local power structure, so they relied on their own video and data-gathering to protect themselves from abuses and neglect or to whip up public outcry in their favor.
The re-establishment and expansion of pre-Fall social networks was important psychologically as survivors tried to reconnect with friends and loved ones. The reputation economy rapidly matured from people passing along information and aid to a sophisticated exchange of social obligation; for many, the only thing they could trade on was the strength of their name. Social networks also were a vital instrument to the rebuilding of social ties and connections, establishing new cultural groupings and memetic tribes to replace the shattered identities of Earth. The major delineation between the new surveillance/sousveillance networks from their earlier
20th- and 21st-century predecessors was that these were discussed and planned as such in public discourse. The previous de facto universal surveillance was deliberately recreated with an updated architecture that emphasized the active participation of the individual for the express purpose of creating, sharing, and protecting a thorough public record of personal actions. In essence, a new participatory panopticon was embraced as beneficial to the public and authorities at large. This was particularly true in autonomist holds, where an informed and collectively networked populace acted in place of authority figures and police. The exigencies of the post-Fall era made sure that opting-in to the universal data exchange had direct social and material beneﬁts. The all-seeing eye of central authority had been replaced with the ever-present eyes of the general public.
Given the variety of political structures and social arrangements throughout the solar system, the adoption of the new transparent societal model is not universal. Many jurisdictions still emphasize authoritarian monitoring and discourage or even counteract public sousveillance. Others embrace it fully, going so far as to legally mandate it. Most telling, perhaps, are the varying attitudes towards personal privacy, and whether it is regarded as a privilege or a right—or in particular a right essential to personal liberty. In some habitats, operating in private mesh mode is considered rude or even illegal. In others, it is accepted and encouraged. These attitudes extend even further, ranging from being subject to totalitarian searches with no legal recourse to accepting the use of personal privacy shrouds.
One universally accepted argument for the participatory panopticon is a need for keener vigilance against a repeat of the disasters of the Fall. Systems of pervasive data-logging and comprehensive sur- and sousveillance are considered fundamental to protecting transhumanity from future disasters.
===Sidebar: Leaving the Past Behind=== 
Many people took advantage of the chaos and loss of records during the Fall to leave their old selves and forge ahead with fresh new identities. Some of these were people who simply wished to forget their past, to sever the connections to their former lives and lost loved ones, but many were criminals and subversives looking to shed their checkered pasts. Some were even war criminals, responsible for looting the treasuries of national governments, massacring civilians, or condemning thousands to succumb to the alloy claws of the TITANs. Not all adopted new identities—for many it was easy to take over the personas of those they knew to have fallen during the exodus.
To this day there is a thriving business for ego hunters in tracking down people who cast off their old identities in the Fall. They pursue lost data and cold trails, hoping to ﬁnd war criminals to drag before tribunals, claim rewards on stolen riches, or reunite lost ones with estranged family or lovers.
==Surveillance Society 2.0== 
Now, a decade after the Fall, it is common for individuals to have a massive presence on multiple networks simultaneously. Each person creates a constant data trail of location and activity through their mesh presence, social proﬁles, online activity, and personal gear. If those connections are monitored, it’s possible to ﬁnd out what they’re accessing, with whom they’re interacting, and where they are located. This activity can also be traced into the past via various records, as well as extrapolated in the future with a fair amount of certainty using predictive algorithms and historical records. Spimes, publicams, and private sensors record an individual’s activity in most public areas. AIs and pattern-matching algorithms scan their biometrics on a regular basis. Businesses and other individuals will retain peripheral records of economic transactions through social networks or credit transfers. Other people around them are also lifelogging and looking through walls, clothes, and public records with sensory and software suites.
The indirect data of individual actions accrues in everyone and everything in their vicinity. Then there’s the publicly available information each individual generates with status updates and media sharing. That information is also supplemented by “private” recordings, archived in enhanced memory or external storage hosts. Even the soft, wet recording in the brain is stored in the cortical stacks almost every transhuman has and is backed up regularly.
Pervasive surveillance is a social norm. Most transhumans appreciate that they are being watched and recorded every moment of their lives. For some, it’s a reminder that they’re always on, constantly building social networks, fame, or infamy. Others take comfort in observation, knowing that they are being watched but that the same systems also look out for their personal safety and the calm, safe, dependable operation of their homes. Everyone beneﬁts from the changes in law enforcement and public safety: crime is down, perpetrators are almost always caught and victims are compensated.
Privacy, however, is not dead. Homes and personal areas feature privacy ﬁlters that allow access only to authorized individuals. Privacy modes can be erected to withhold information and deter tracking. Anonymization services, encrypted communications, and crypto-cred enable people to hide their activities from watchful eyes. Disguises, privacy shrouds, and pseudonymous morphs allow for individuals to go about their physical business without recognition. Other tricks of the trade remain for spies, criminals, and revolutionaries.

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