EP623: Surveillance Fatigue

[eytanz]

Escape Pod 623: Surveillance Fatigue

AUTHOR : Jennifer R. Donohue
NARRATOR : Diane Severson Mori
HOST: S. B. Divya

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Is this woman a terrorist? It’s my job to decide.

My typical first step is social media, before I delve into the emails, the school records. Fortified with overbrewed office coffee, I take an afternoon and read through all three years of her 140-character thoughts, brief conversations with other users, occasional pictures. We’re encouraged to have our own process, and my entire workload, the entire organization’s workload, takes place on glowing screens large and small. We are constantly reading, listening, watching, bionic earbuds ensconced, AR glasses feeding us a constant stream of information. At the end of the day, we stumble out into natural light like people waking from a dream. The building which houses the organization is officially something too boring to look at twice, data storage or legal processing, office upon shell office of generic secretaries designed to deflect public inquiry.

Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!

[skeletondragon]

It's hard to write good dystopian fiction when we're already living in a dystopia, and part of that is because of surveillance fatigue - the panopticon no longer seems as horrifying. So what? We already joke about the NSA agent watching us through our webcam without our knowledge. This story captures that so well.

[Katzentatzen]

This was extremely effective, and I felt the ending like a knife.

[CryptoMe]

I liked the body of this story very much, but I didn't like the ending. Sorry, but I really need more explanation.....

["D"]

Good story, but the ending confused me. Was the agent being tested, and if so, how did the agency determine she was a threat? The subject didn't sound like she was in on it, but that wasn't clear either. Maybe the agent was being pulled from the field before she could blow her cover? This ending really left me unsatisfied.

[RexMagenta]

The point of the ending, I think, is that despite her inside knowledge the agent is still vulnerable to surveillance fatigue like anyone else. She's so busy looking into her target's life that she forgets someone else will be watching hers.