In China, evading the watchful eyes of the government sometimes feels like an exercise in futility. The place is wired with about 200 million surveillance cameras, Beijing controls the telecom companies, and every internet company has to hand over data when the police want it. They also know where journalists live because we register our address with police. In Shanghai, the police regularly come to my apartment . . .
Paul Mozur in the NYT
No matter what you're doing and no matter where you go
the State is always watching with great vigor and gusto.
A sneeze in Beijing registers way off in old Shanghai,
and loudspeakers will offer a 'gesunheidt' or 'banzai!'
But China ain't the only place where snooping's universal;
busybodies now enjoy a great world-wide dispersal.
Kayaking in Canada or eating snails in France,
some agency is watching you and making notes askance.
You're free to travel as you please, to do most anything;
but just remember GPS will generate a ping.
A ping some zealot or some spy will enter in your file;
and data on your foibles will be growing mile by mile.
And then a knock upon your door, as sure as God made grapes,
when you will have to answer to officious prying apes;
who follow cyber footprints like detectives in a book,
and like to hang the innocent upon their pointed hook.
It's not only reporters that now need encrypted apps,
or use the Bag of Faraday to foil attempted taps.
The common man and woman are in peril from those ops
who stalk the internet like bandits or the fell Cyclops.
Luckily each agency that's spying on your life
is fighting other agencies with long and deadly strife.
They share no information and are at each other's throats,
feuding over sectors like a bunch of randy goats.
And so the day may come when all those snooping bureaucrats
will destroy each other with their internecine spats.
But that has been repeated until now a shibboleth;
The thought of no more prying -- well, I wouldn't hold my breath.
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