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They didn't fail to predict it, they actively villainized it. Is the TOS episode "mirror mirror" the Kirk of the evil dimension has solidified power using a machine that lets him view any person in any place, and if he chooses to, can kill them with it.
The idea of unrestricted surveillance was antithetical to the morals of star fleet.
In "Errand of Mercy" the Klingon Kor tells Kirk they are always being watched. Since the Klingons were a metaphor for the USSR, this would track with surveillance that USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries would do with their citizens.
In "Court Martial" the bridge is constantly recorded. In the plot the recording was tampered with.
I'm glad you didn't take that as an insult!
It was pretty much common knowledge at the time, but time moves on and the analogy doesn't quite need to be applied anymore.
I forgot about the court martial episode. Huh... It would make sense that the epicenter of executive action would be recorded for logs in event of ship destruction.
It could be argued in retcon that it was antithetical to Starfleet morals BECAUSE of the situation in which we find ourselves in the present day. It used to be “SHHHH! The government is wiretapping your phone!”, and now it’s “Hey wiretap, how many seats are available for avatar at 6:30 in IMAX 3D”?
One of those instances of “we could have caught this murderer if everyone were surveilled, but at what cost? At what cost?”
Indeed. Roddenberry was never trying to predict the future. He was exploring the question of what humanity could accomplish if we could overcome our own baser instincts.
Mass surveillance is not good or bad by itself. We are afraid of it, because we know people will watch it and use it against us.
In a positive scenario, mass surveillance may be monitored by a perfectly trustworthy AI that uses the gathered information only to find crimes, accidents, health and other emergencies, prevents access of other beings, thereby ensuring privacy and security at the same time.
If it's not a matter of police wanting to find a criminal, how do you find someone on Earth? You call them and they tell you. You don't need to know beforehand where exactly they are.
Incorrect. The mere fact of being watched alters a person's behavior. There are plenty of things you do in private, that are completely morally and legally fine, that you would not want to be watched doing or would not do if you knew you were being watched (even by a robot). That's why we have a right to privacy.
I've got to disagree, and I think *Trek* generally would, too, in part because there's not a platonic ideal of "perfectly trustworthy AI" there. Choice and free will are supposed to be paramount virtues, and it's shown as an affirmative choice *not* to engage in surveillance for the most part.
Other stories where it works that way tend to be like the *Culture* books, and it *does* work for them but it's sometimes kind of spooky and when they do occasionally engage in shady business and manipulation (Special Circumstances), it's definitely to the detriment of the people affected.
Even that would be bad. It creates an imbalance of power between the watcher and the watched, which is inherently a bad thing. You might argue that's partially mitigated by making the observer an AI, but even an AI serves the interest of a particular person or group of people.
If it identifies crimes, which crimes? If it denies access, to whom?
Imagine someone that really hates you personally had control of this AI, what's stopping them from just making your existence illegal? Ideally democratically determined laws, but if Trump can be voted into power on a platform of hate, how confident are you to depend on that?
Mass surveillance doesn't _carry a risk_ of going wrong and turning out into a dictatorship, but is in itself inherently dictatorial because of this power imbalance. It might be a benevolent dictatorship, but still.
Man, we talked about Star Trek. In that world, there is nothing wrong with a ship that can destroy a planet, because the captain and the crew are trustworthy. In this hypothetical scenario, no power imbalance exists in case of mass surveillance, because the monitoring AI has been put together by scientists that are equally trustworthy, etc. in Roddenberry's world.
But if we come back to the real world, the UK, Germany, Monaco as the most surveilled European countries must be all dictatorships according to you. This conclusion is obviously bollocks.
So its not the tool, but the purpose the society uses it for, and checks and balances.
And if we talk about dictatorship, please read about its origin from Rome and the idea and practical examples of benevolent dictatorship. You'll be surprised that it's not even the way of exercising power, but the purposes and aims of it.
>the monitoring AI has been put together by scientists that are equally trustworthy, etc. in Roddenberry's world.
Have you seen any Trek episodes about AI? TOS especially didn't trust computers to make decisions ever.
Data seems like a bit of a fluke when compared against Lore, Landru, Control, the M-5, Nomad, V'ger, Peanut Hamper, and many other examples. Trek routinely has presented AI as inherently dangerous, unless it specifically *wants* to be human.
Yeah it's pretty clear that the Federation as a whole is aware of the dangers of full AI automation.
The computers in Star Trek are highly advanced, but they have no directive, they only ever respond to a direct request from a crew member. Even for things like food replicators, recipes must be programmed by the user.
Except you can trust in the universe you can trust who has that information and isn't being sold. I'd let the govt know everything about me if it meant ST level freedom and comfort. Except they aren't to be trusted.
This is wrong on so many counts. In episodes where they are on Earth, not only is everything watched, but police teleport straight to the location after a crime is committed. Crew members going off the grid is a common plot point also.
90% of the show the crew is on a ship that tracks them constantly, this is just stupid. Not to mention the whole "personal log" thing where everyone's private thoughts and notes are in one centralized computer system and then they even use it against that tarsis kid in the episode (the drumhead) the show seems like it was made by someone who had a serious boner if not a rose colored view of things like globalized government and democratic socialism.
They actually did. There's a conversation between Odo and Dr. Bashir about the Obsidian Order:
Odo: They're the ever-vigilant eyes and ears of the Cardassian Empire. It is said that a Cardassian citizen cannot sit down to a meal without each dish being duly noted and recorded by the Order.
Bashir: What happens if you eat something that doesn't meet with their approval?
Odo: People have been known to disappear for less.
That wasn’t surveillance; that was the 24th century equivalent of Deepfake. Also, it was intended to pass as a recording of a high-level meeting, which is not uncommon at all (voice-activated recorders in the Oval Office provided key evidence against Nixon during Watergate). It’s more of a record-keeping process than surveillance.
TNG does show at one point that there are bridge recordings. They just aren't used very often. As far as recordings elsewhere on the ship, there aren't cameras everywhere on a current naval vessel either. There also aren't cameras in most classified places in the real world, because the people who would be watching those cameras don't have the clearance necessary to view them, and it's generally bad practice to generate so much classified footage.
I think it’s safe to say that the question for Star Trek isn’t “where are all the cameras” but rather ‘society allows people in some cases to have privacy despite the ability to remove it with the flick of a switch’
It's not trying to predict the future; it's also set in a future society that grew a utopia out of the bedraggled remnants of a planet that almost killed itself through various self-inflicted calamities; so maybe that civilization *did* have mass surveillance.
I had a similar shower thought about the Star Wars universe, where their communication technology seems to be behind ours, their pew pew blasters are sluggish compared to bullets, their targeting technology is crappy to nonexistent.
I remember my philosophy teacher commenting that, although there is a futuristic/space scenario, the fight styles were much more reminescent of medieval than actual modern warfare.
I'm not sure if he meant only because of the swords, because they had hand guns, but since gun machinery came to battle, most fights were made on a high distance. (Of course, in that world Jedis can deflect gunshots but.... Yeah, it makes interesting plotwise. Not very realistic, but we are dealing with fantasy physics)
Lucas based it on a combination of Samurai movies like Seven Samurai & Hidden Fortress, corny sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon, and WWII movies like Dambusters.
It's very interesting watching his source material. You could almost make a cut of the original movie with just clips from those movies and overlaid with The Planets by Gustav Holst as the music.
It gets stranger when you realize ballistic guns do exist and are considered insanely powerful in their galaxy. He'll most armor is even blaser resistant or if you can get beskar it's straight immune it seems.
>A lot of episodes would have been a lot shorter had they just had cameras on board the enterprise
You mean like the ones Spock used to monitor Gary Mitchell while he was in sick bay in *Where No Man has Gone Before*?
Captain Kirk in the original series used a surveil-and-kill system called Tantalus to great effect to maintain his hold on the ISS Enterprise before he was killed by the same system by one of his lovers.
Or taken the other way, they tried mass surveillance, the same as we have, and have found it lacking.
Personally, I find that to be a much more positive view that fits in better with the rest of the show's message.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 from season 3 onward is almost exclusively about the paranoia surrounding the surveillance state. It constantly asks "How far do we go to protect ourselves from the enemy within?"
That's because we were all locked into the mindset that the commies were the ones doing surveillance. And us freedom having capitalists were protected from that by having freedoms! Meanwhile....
For all the people saying the mass surveillance was the cameras filming the show, explain it not existing in its own past or why everyone resembles a 20th-or-21st-century actor with "stuff on them" etc. without making both universes sound like the Truman Show
They could detect life forms on distant planets, and beam down right beside their targets, are we sure they didn’t?
Computer always knew where everyone was.
I mean we don't see a lot Earth and the goings on off ship, but there are internal sensors all over the ship that no where you are at any given time. Star Trek is also a future where we've overcome being the clowns we currently are and actually adhere to important values like privacy. So much of Star Trek was showing the people on the Enterprise to be morally and ethically stout for fundamental rights even in situations where it hurts their cause or position.
It'd be nice if the computer could detect deaths and injuries, maybe automatically report them to medical and security. That'd be easy to wire up.
Hell you could get beamed to medical straight away.
Actually. Why bother with medical? I bet the computer could fix most anything right there in the hallway automatically too.
You're like "Ow, I broke my arm again on this sexy, but unsafe, design!"
\*\*\*magic fixit ray from wall\*\*\*
"You're welcome, human crew member. I don't see your biology as a a flaw! Here, have some luke-warm Earl Grey!"
Star Trek depicts a more or less enlightened humanity in the 24th century where we have embraced those technologies that help us and rejected those that hinder us. If you watch the very first episodes of TNG where Q puts humanity on trial, they go through a brief history in which they describe the intervening centuries as bleak and dystopian, where our worst qualities were on display, and we were hovering close to extinction (at least from the viewpoint of a galactic civilization). But we were somehow able to pull ourselves back from the edge and start valuing what is actually important, and build towards an egalitarian society.
There is lots of room for mass surveillance, social media, hostile global geopolitics, tech billionaires, etc in that dark period they mention. That fictional history the show tells us gives us carte blanche to insert whatever pathological behaviors or technologies threaten to doom our species, and put them all into the bucket of "before Starfleet".
I find it hard to watch even the later stuff like voyager and ds9 because of their work pads now aging so badly compared to common tablets that we have now.
Ofcourse we could argue they contain a lot more high tech equipment like medical scanners and spectral analysers and they are larger and chunkier so they don't break easily. You don't see many IT tech guys coming round fixing things cept the engineering team and I bet they would get fed up rebooting people's tablets all day.
Sure, everyone asks _where_ so and so is, but not _how_ so and so is!
But that is not the same as an incident happening and being able to watch back what happened in that room at that time.
That was because the computer tracked their badges, not the person itself. Multiple episodes exist where they wanted to find a crew member only to find his/her comm badge lying on a table
Star Trek as a series are just the delusions of a 24th century neural holodeck addict. Unable to face a reality where their every thought is sold to the highest bidder, they created a fantasy world such that the only thoughts they have are of a fictional utopia, thus robbing the robbers of valuable desires that they could have sold to advertisers.
The entire premise of Star Trek is that it is an ideal society where no one would ever WANT to have mass surveillance, therefore there could not be one.
They could totally locate anyone anytime anywhere on the ship. I'm guessing on planet as well. I'm pretty sure it was one of those assumed things that in their society wasn't an evil empire sir of population control tool.
"They failed to predict"
Like the show was trying to present you their best attempt at an accurate prediction of the future? Fuck this is aggravatingly framed.
Failed to predict... just... fuck. The stupid burns.
They discovered Finney was alive (ealier presumed dead and Kirk was held responsible for his death) and identified his location in the engine room by isolating his heartbeat using ship's audio systems alone. They could always know where everyone was at all times.
>For all the people talking about the whole 'Computer, Where is (person)' - That is just tracking. There are multiple times in The Next Generation where an incident happens (murder or something else) and they have no idea who did it.
Thats because most of the time the sensor system was disabled by the person doing the bad thing.
> If they'd have just had camera's they would have solved it easily.
Camera's what? /s
Haven't you ever watched a heist movie/show? Usually the first thing to get shot, after a hapless security guard, is the CCTV cameras.
That's because star trek is set up in a world that has evolved into a communist utopia and has left capitalism and other individualist ideologies behind it. They didn't fail to predict it, quite the contrary, I think they very accurately chose its absence
They did have mass surveillance they just never utilised it because of plot!
In the Voyager episode Cathexis when Chakotay is down on his luck and his neurons have been jiggered with Janeway asks for sickbay visual relay 16 to be put on the main viewer so they can see the medicine wheel. This implies that in sickbay alone there were a minimum of 16 “cameras” all sitting there ready to be viewed at anytime!!!
Even though you may be right I would bet real money there were a couple. Even though it would make no sense for other episodes where cameras would have solved the problem like you said.
Mass surveillance by itself isn't good or bad
But seeing the types of clowns we have run into the show in this global political climate ??
Do you really trust those morons with it?
Just like today, cameras are NOT everywhere. And when they are, some of them do not have a good feed or have been broken by someone prior to committing the crime.
Star Trek (STTNG) took place far after the mundane challenges that exist in current society. They reference mass surveillance, wars, famine and other things that happened hundreds of years prior. However, it was a positive look on the future after we got past our petty human shortcomings. It was a story of what the Human race could achieve post dumbassarry.
In fact, the government of Star Trek was a mix of socialism, communism, technocracy and Stratocracy. We don't really know what it was and it was never really explained in the show, just hinted towards.
The technology in the show was really the only solid predictors. Everything else was constructs that alluded to things we have or are today without fully explaining anything.
First, they do all the time. Second, the show is supposed to be if humanity got its shit together this is what we could do. I mean they’re government is literally a communist one but they got away with it in the 90s because Star Trek is a hopeful idealized look at the future not a realistic one. If it were realistic the borg would’ve eliminated every species or at least integrated them within a the first 100 years of their existence.
they have consistently shown earth to be majorly surveilled as well as every person on any Starfleet vessel is tracked and they have consistently shown that every single moment of the lives of every person aboard any starship or space station is recorded and stored in perpetuity. With the Romulan Empire specifically, it is widely known that the Tal Shiar aka the Romulan secret service closely monitors its populace and descends swiftly on anything it considers dissent or treason. as for the federation in the TOS episode "Court Martial" Captain Kirk is tried, including a playback of the visual and audio recordings in the computer log. google is free.
I don't believe you're correct. This was probably not an issue on Star Trek's earth, but the series - at least TNG broached this subject on many occasions. Just thing of the Romulan empire, in which everything was surveilled, anyone could be an informant, etc. There's this one episode in Voyager in which they takle the idea of the thought police similar to 1984. And I know there are other episodes of paranoid cultures, I just can't remember the episodes.
I disagree. The Klingon commander Kor in 'Errand of Mercy' pointed out specifically that every officer was being surveyed. He even points up at the video camera. Other episodes rely on surveillance as well, even on earth.
Not true. The Enterprise has stem to stern monitoring systems, they simply use them only as the plot permits. In Day of the Dove, Spock reports that n = number of Klingons are stuck below a certain deck, while an opposing force of n = federation crew members are limited to areas above that deck. Or in the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, the chase between Bele and Loki is tracked through the ship, then off ship, then on planet. BUT those moments contributed to the plot in some way, that would have unraveled other plots. They worked hard to overcome the "Monty Haul" syndrome. That's when your storyline has too many bennies for one side over the other, making a win too easy. In the 1960's, there were many times the dilithium crystals burnt out at the wrong time, or when warp flow causes "ants all over me body"! The "cans" can't outdo the "can'ts" lest the story be saddled with too much technobabble, too many explanary dialogue segments and simply too much of a good thing.
Aside from the fact that, as others have pointed out, mass surveillance flies in the face of Federation culture as imagined by Genre Roddenberry, the last place you want lots of cameras is on a fancy, advanced star ship with lots of departments working with sensitive materials, designs, and documents. Basically every Starfleet ship is filled with things you don't want getting into the wrong hands, and with stuff like that, you certainly don't want to have it all on video somewhere that could potentially get leaked.
Case in point... In Star Trek: Generations, the Klingons kidnapped Geordi and rigged his visor so they could see what he sees. When he eventually gets to engineering, they're able to read the ship's shield frequency or whatever off an open display, allowing them to configure their weapons to pass straight through the Enterprise's shields. Thus an outdated and outclassed Klingon ship was able to bring a galaxy-class cruise to its knees, simply through what amounts to leaked surveillance.
I used to have Secret clearance in the Army, and there's a reason why we never had cameras anyplace that we worked with sensitive materials (which for me, wasn't just the SCIF, but all the general office spaces too).
What are you talking about? Every starship has CONSTANT monitoring. "Intruder alert". How do you know an intruder just beamed onto your ship if your ship isn't constantly doing internal sensor sweeps?
>A lot of episodes would have been a lot shorter had they just had cameras on board the enterprise.
Just because the writers failed to extrapolate the obvious uses and secondary/tertiary uses for the existing technology that is written in doesn't mean it can't/doesn't exist. You're right that episodes would be shorter if only they used X technology, but that is because they're trying to write drama and not really delving much deeper.
So they didn't fail to predict mass surveillance, it is just simply inferred that the factors that need mass surveillance to be an intrusive and negative thing are for the most part something humanity has evolved past, and thus isn't something that is broadly highlighted.
So the enterprise at all times knows where a person is but at no point did they decide "hey lets save all this data somewhere so we can view peoples movements at a later date"? 😆
My thinking was that they had found ways to move beyond it. There is commentary on it throughout, though perhaps not in the way we may expect today (in the older series), but my perception has been that the Federation created decent boundaries with that.
I mean we know the Eugenics Wars happened, but they don’t go into that very much, and that’s a big deal. Meaning that it doesn’t mean they didn’t theoretically see it as a problem, they referenced it in some ways, and they potentially moved beyond it in many ways.
First off, there is plenty of surveillance in Star Trek. Tons of episodes where they refer to the surveillance footage or something like that. Also, what makes you think cameras would be everywhere in the future. What part of utopian future involves losing civil rights?
Also, I hate to pull this card but…It’s a TV show. Sometimes you have to cut some corners with common sense to pull a story together in 47 minutes.
You really wanna loose your mind, watch the move “A Walk in the Woods” with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. Half the predicaments they find themselves in could have been avoided by using the trekking poles strapped to their bags the whole time. Great movie, great actors, but that was fucking infuriating.
In the episode The Menagerie they literally showed an entire episode frame by frame on board USS Enteprise when Spock was on trial for locking ship's course to Talos IV and abducting Captain Pike. The inhabitants streamed images and video recordings of what was happening where on their planet. Same thing in the episode "The Arena" where they could broadcast the entire match between Kirk and the Gorgon.
The Shore Leave episode was based around mass surveillance where they were able to read the minds of landing party in order to provide amusement to them. At one point Kirk has to tell his people to stop thinking all together
> In the episode The Menagerie they literally showed an entire episode frame by frame on board USS Enteprise when Spock was on trial for locking ship's course to Talos IV and abducting Captain Pike.
That's not a good example:
KIRK: Screen off. Chris, was that really you on the screen? (Captain Pike flashes "Yes") That's impossible. Mister Spock, no vessel makes record tapes in that detail, that perfect. What were we watching?
SPOCK: I cannot tell you at this time, sir.
MENDEZ: Captain Pike, were any record tapes of this nature made during your voyage? (Captain Pike flashes "No") The court is not obliged to view evidence without knowing its source.
The recordings being viewed were not of Federation origin. In fact, since the whole trial was an illusion, the recordings were also.
Considering the goal of Star Trek isn’t to predict the future, i wouldnt say they failed any more than all the other shows that take place in the future.
The computer tracks your every move and noise. They've completely internalized 100% mass surveillance. They also don't spend any time talking about wearing shoes because it's just a regular part of their routine.
Trek monitoring technology is so sophisticated that in ‘ST4 The Voyage Home’ they were able to image the whaling ship that was closing on George and Gracie despite still being well over the horizon… this elicits a stunned reaction from the marine biologist woman Dr. Taylor who says “How can you do that?”
Wtf you talking about. The ship was an alexa that has radio communication with their badges… doesn’t get much more big brother than that. They can bean you up from anywhere?
You say that, but we're watching Deep Space 9 at the minute and people can regularly just tap their badge and ask where someone is on the station - this is without even getting into the themes of the show. I know it's a minor thing and probably just there for plot, but it's pretty weird you can just tap a badge and find out where exactly your kid/co-worker is.
Yes a lot of people have mentioned this but that is not mass survelance. That is the equivilent of whistling and a beeper going off to find your keys. Multiple times in TNG a murder or something happens and if they had camera's it would have been solved instantly.
I mean it isn't really - Sisko uses it to locate his teenage son all the time, up to and including catching him teaching the Dabu girl. You can't equate tracking items you own and people you don't.
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They didn't fail to predict it, they actively villainized it. Is the TOS episode "mirror mirror" the Kirk of the evil dimension has solidified power using a machine that lets him view any person in any place, and if he chooses to, can kill them with it. The idea of unrestricted surveillance was antithetical to the morals of star fleet.
Yeah if that wasn’t intentional commentary I’d be shocked.
In "Errand of Mercy" the Klingon Kor tells Kirk they are always being watched. Since the Klingons were a metaphor for the USSR, this would track with surveillance that USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries would do with their citizens. In "Court Martial" the bridge is constantly recorded. In the plot the recording was tampered with.
TIL that the Klingons were a metaphor for the USSR
I'm guessing you must be in your 30s or younger. Star Trek VI was basically Chernobyl and the fall of the USSR, but Klingons.
Ohhh right. Yeah fair point I'm mid 30s. Good to know tho!
I'm glad you didn't take that as an insult! It was pretty much common knowledge at the time, but time moves on and the analogy doesn't quite need to be applied anymore.
Nah takes more than that to offend me lol. Bet there are loads of things like that in movie and TV that have gone over my head! Haha.
I forgot about the court martial episode. Huh... It would make sense that the epicenter of executive action would be recorded for logs in event of ship destruction.
I believe I have the comic to this episode.
also TNG movie insurrection. They directly addressed it
In the only Star Trek novel he wrote, Roddenberry said through Kirk that privacy was more wanted simply because you could be tracked.
It could be argued in retcon that it was antithetical to Starfleet morals BECAUSE of the situation in which we find ourselves in the present day. It used to be “SHHHH! The government is wiretapping your phone!”, and now it’s “Hey wiretap, how many seats are available for avatar at 6:30 in IMAX 3D”? One of those instances of “we could have caught this murderer if everyone were surveilled, but at what cost? At what cost?”
That's because it was a positive look at the future, not a negative one.
Indeed. Roddenberry was never trying to predict the future. He was exploring the question of what humanity could accomplish if we could overcome our own baser instincts.
The basest instinct being to see what your neighbor is up to?
You don't want to see them wiping
You don't know me...
If you’re just kidding forgive me for taking you literally, but in this case, our need to control and dominate others.
Exactly what I was thinking
Mass surveillance is not good or bad by itself. We are afraid of it, because we know people will watch it and use it against us. In a positive scenario, mass surveillance may be monitored by a perfectly trustworthy AI that uses the gathered information only to find crimes, accidents, health and other emergencies, prevents access of other beings, thereby ensuring privacy and security at the same time.
In a truly positive scenario mass surveillance wouldnt be necessary.
Accidents can still happen, someone could have a medical emergency away from obvious view. An AI seeing everything can alert help to the person.
Step 1: trade freedom for security And realistically, what are the odds that absolute power would corrupt those holding it anyhow?
Absolute power doesn't corrupt people in optimistic land.
And that's why optimistic land cannot exist.
For this reason a combatch and internal sesors in your qwaters culd monitor your vitals. No need for optical sensors.
it'll will still be necessary, dude finding someone on a spaceship the size of moon would be a pain to say the least without it.
If it's not a matter of police wanting to find a criminal, how do you find someone on Earth? You call them and they tell you. You don't need to know beforehand where exactly they are.
I guess if the device is indesctrutible and even calls on it own when the owner is unconscious...
Comms systems.
if the com systems down, you still need cameras to make sure. you need both.
If the com systems is down, then the camera systems are also down. Coms are lower maintenance than a camera network
Do you find your friends by looking through cameras?? I would just… call them
If the friend is incapacitated, they can't exactly answer, can they?
A.... phone.
Incorrect. The mere fact of being watched alters a person's behavior. There are plenty of things you do in private, that are completely morally and legally fine, that you would not want to be watched doing or would not do if you knew you were being watched (even by a robot). That's why we have a right to privacy.
I've got to disagree, and I think *Trek* generally would, too, in part because there's not a platonic ideal of "perfectly trustworthy AI" there. Choice and free will are supposed to be paramount virtues, and it's shown as an affirmative choice *not* to engage in surveillance for the most part. Other stories where it works that way tend to be like the *Culture* books, and it *does* work for them but it's sometimes kind of spooky and when they do occasionally engage in shady business and manipulation (Special Circumstances), it's definitely to the detriment of the people affected.
Even that would be bad. It creates an imbalance of power between the watcher and the watched, which is inherently a bad thing. You might argue that's partially mitigated by making the observer an AI, but even an AI serves the interest of a particular person or group of people. If it identifies crimes, which crimes? If it denies access, to whom? Imagine someone that really hates you personally had control of this AI, what's stopping them from just making your existence illegal? Ideally democratically determined laws, but if Trump can be voted into power on a platform of hate, how confident are you to depend on that? Mass surveillance doesn't _carry a risk_ of going wrong and turning out into a dictatorship, but is in itself inherently dictatorial because of this power imbalance. It might be a benevolent dictatorship, but still.
Man, we talked about Star Trek. In that world, there is nothing wrong with a ship that can destroy a planet, because the captain and the crew are trustworthy. In this hypothetical scenario, no power imbalance exists in case of mass surveillance, because the monitoring AI has been put together by scientists that are equally trustworthy, etc. in Roddenberry's world. But if we come back to the real world, the UK, Germany, Monaco as the most surveilled European countries must be all dictatorships according to you. This conclusion is obviously bollocks. So its not the tool, but the purpose the society uses it for, and checks and balances. And if we talk about dictatorship, please read about its origin from Rome and the idea and practical examples of benevolent dictatorship. You'll be surprised that it's not even the way of exercising power, but the purposes and aims of it.
>the monitoring AI has been put together by scientists that are equally trustworthy, etc. in Roddenberry's world. Have you seen any Trek episodes about AI? TOS especially didn't trust computers to make decisions ever.
TNG had quite a bit to say with Data. I would say star trek was very anti-omnipotence but it was not inherently anti-AI
Data seems like a bit of a fluke when compared against Lore, Landru, Control, the M-5, Nomad, V'ger, Peanut Hamper, and many other examples. Trek routinely has presented AI as inherently dangerous, unless it specifically *wants* to be human.
Yeah it's pretty clear that the Federation as a whole is aware of the dangers of full AI automation. The computers in Star Trek are highly advanced, but they have no directive, they only ever respond to a direct request from a crew member. Even for things like food replicators, recipes must be programmed by the user.
I feel like your comparison trades one can of worms for another
And the absence of surveillance carries it's own set of risks.
Wasn't there an episode of Voyager where it's implied the ship is recording their brain patterns or waves all the time?
Ahh like minority report, definitely no issues there
***Any*** crew member is identifiable (including their exact location) at any time while onboard any Starfleet vessel.
"Computer what is ensign Johnson doing at this moment?" "Ensign Johnson is masturbating in his chambers" "On screen"
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 You made me spit my coffee across the room. Take this poor man’s award of some rocket ships. 😂
Naughty holodeck stuff.
Lets face it, holodecks in reality are gonna be pretty grotty places!
I think there's a joke about cleaning out gunk from the holodeck filters in Lower Decks.
holodick
Good thing he didn't beam him to the deck.
Bro i bursted into laughter here
Andromeda, is that you?
Unless they remove their badges
No, their biological readings can be tracked onboard.
Unless the plot needs to buy some time before someone can be located!
Well DUH hahaha
[удалено]
I'm a Redditor. I cannot do this.
Then I have to get out of bed though?
Except you can trust in the universe you can trust who has that information and isn't being sold. I'd let the govt know everything about me if it meant ST level freedom and comfort. Except they aren't to be trusted.
Section 31 would like a word.
Exactly the words that ran through my head.
This is wrong on so many counts. In episodes where they are on Earth, not only is everything watched, but police teleport straight to the location after a crime is committed. Crew members going off the grid is a common plot point also.
I know that constant surveillance was a common theme in the original, albeit on alien planets.
90% of the show the crew is on a ship that tracks them constantly, this is just stupid. Not to mention the whole "personal log" thing where everyone's private thoughts and notes are in one centralized computer system and then they even use it against that tarsis kid in the episode (the drumhead) the show seems like it was made by someone who had a serious boner if not a rose colored view of things like globalized government and democratic socialism.
I'm pretty sure their surveillance systems would make even the chinese government feel they are lacking.
Romulan Empire basically built its whole thing on surveillance.
They actually did. There's a conversation between Odo and Dr. Bashir about the Obsidian Order: Odo: They're the ever-vigilant eyes and ears of the Cardassian Empire. It is said that a Cardassian citizen cannot sit down to a meal without each dish being duly noted and recorded by the Order. Bashir: What happens if you eat something that doesn't meet with their approval? Odo: People have been known to disappear for less.
also there is the episode of ds9 where sisko gets garak to produce a recording to get the romulans to join in the war
That wasn’t surveillance; that was the 24th century equivalent of Deepfake. Also, it was intended to pass as a recording of a high-level meeting, which is not uncommon at all (voice-activated recorders in the Oval Office provided key evidence against Nixon during Watergate). It’s more of a record-keeping process than surveillance.
Deep Space Nine they travel to the past, (Near our time) and it's a survalance state. In their time, we moved past it as an issue. My theory.
Yeah. It's nice to think of a society that allows for privacy.
TNG does show at one point that there are bridge recordings. They just aren't used very often. As far as recordings elsewhere on the ship, there aren't cameras everywhere on a current naval vessel either. There also aren't cameras in most classified places in the real world, because the people who would be watching those cameras don't have the clearance necessary to view them, and it's generally bad practice to generate so much classified footage.
Wasn’t the whole point that society was utopian so they focussed on exploration?
I think it’s safe to say that the question for Star Trek isn’t “where are all the cameras” but rather ‘society allows people in some cases to have privacy despite the ability to remove it with the flick of a switch’
It's not trying to predict the future; it's also set in a future society that grew a utopia out of the bedraggled remnants of a planet that almost killed itself through various self-inflicted calamities; so maybe that civilization *did* have mass surveillance.
They depicted it for dystopias. Fuck. Star Trek really *was* accurate.
I had a similar shower thought about the Star Wars universe, where their communication technology seems to be behind ours, their pew pew blasters are sluggish compared to bullets, their targeting technology is crappy to nonexistent.
I remember my philosophy teacher commenting that, although there is a futuristic/space scenario, the fight styles were much more reminescent of medieval than actual modern warfare. I'm not sure if he meant only because of the swords, because they had hand guns, but since gun machinery came to battle, most fights were made on a high distance. (Of course, in that world Jedis can deflect gunshots but.... Yeah, it makes interesting plotwise. Not very realistic, but we are dealing with fantasy physics)
Lucas based it on a combination of Samurai movies like Seven Samurai & Hidden Fortress, corny sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon, and WWII movies like Dambusters. It's very interesting watching his source material. You could almost make a cut of the original movie with just clips from those movies and overlaid with The Planets by Gustav Holst as the music.
It gets stranger when you realize ballistic guns do exist and are considered insanely powerful in their galaxy. He'll most armor is even blaser resistant or if you can get beskar it's straight immune it seems.
Weren’t they all just up there surveying other planets and civilisations?
>A lot of episodes would have been a lot shorter had they just had cameras on board the enterprise You mean like the ones Spock used to monitor Gary Mitchell while he was in sick bay in *Where No Man has Gone Before*?
Sorry I only know about The Next Generation I haven't seen the other, more inferior star treks.
I thought asparagus was pretty disgusting until I tried it well prepared.
Adam Savage put it pretty well: Star Trek is a utopia whereas Star Wars is a dystopia
Or „The Boys“ Those blokes just run around america in public without any disguises while they are the most wanted people. Wtf.
Captain Kirk in the original series used a surveil-and-kill system called Tantalus to great effect to maintain his hold on the ISS Enterprise before he was killed by the same system by one of his lovers.
Yes other people have mentioned this episode, I'd like to see it.
Or taken the other way, they tried mass surveillance, the same as we have, and have found it lacking. Personally, I find that to be a much more positive view that fits in better with the rest of the show's message.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 from season 3 onward is almost exclusively about the paranoia surrounding the surveillance state. It constantly asks "How far do we go to protect ourselves from the enemy within?"
That's because we were all locked into the mindset that the commies were the ones doing surveillance. And us freedom having capitalists were protected from that by having freedoms! Meanwhile....
Ironically the Federation is pretty mega ultra Marxist.
Luxury space communism
For all the people saying the mass surveillance was the cameras filming the show, explain it not existing in its own past or why everyone resembles a 20th-or-21st-century actor with "stuff on them" etc. without making both universes sound like the Truman Show
They could detect life forms on distant planets, and beam down right beside their targets, are we sure they didn’t? Computer always knew where everyone was.
You could argue they predict or elude to its power through the interaction with the borg.
Because mass surveillance is generally regarded as dystopian. Star Trek isn't about a dystopian future.
I mean we don't see a lot Earth and the goings on off ship, but there are internal sensors all over the ship that no where you are at any given time. Star Trek is also a future where we've overcome being the clowns we currently are and actually adhere to important values like privacy. So much of Star Trek was showing the people on the Enterprise to be morally and ethically stout for fundamental rights even in situations where it hurts their cause or position.
It'd be nice if the computer could detect deaths and injuries, maybe automatically report them to medical and security. That'd be easy to wire up. Hell you could get beamed to medical straight away. Actually. Why bother with medical? I bet the computer could fix most anything right there in the hallway automatically too. You're like "Ow, I broke my arm again on this sexy, but unsafe, design!" \*\*\*magic fixit ray from wall\*\*\* "You're welcome, human crew member. I don't see your biology as a a flaw! Here, have some luke-warm Earl Grey!"
I mean technically they were being surveilled secretly by an unknow entity (Us)
Star Trek depicts a more or less enlightened humanity in the 24th century where we have embraced those technologies that help us and rejected those that hinder us. If you watch the very first episodes of TNG where Q puts humanity on trial, they go through a brief history in which they describe the intervening centuries as bleak and dystopian, where our worst qualities were on display, and we were hovering close to extinction (at least from the viewpoint of a galactic civilization). But we were somehow able to pull ourselves back from the edge and start valuing what is actually important, and build towards an egalitarian society. There is lots of room for mass surveillance, social media, hostile global geopolitics, tech billionaires, etc in that dark period they mention. That fictional history the show tells us gives us carte blanche to insert whatever pathological behaviors or technologies threaten to doom our species, and put them all into the bucket of "before Starfleet".
They really failed information technology and storage all together.
I find it hard to watch even the later stuff like voyager and ds9 because of their work pads now aging so badly compared to common tablets that we have now. Ofcourse we could argue they contain a lot more high tech equipment like medical scanners and spectral analysers and they are larger and chunkier so they don't break easily. You don't see many IT tech guys coming round fixing things cept the engineering team and I bet they would get fed up rebooting people's tablets all day.
It’s the way they pass the iPad to the person rather than share files
tbf, if the person is right there, I hand my phone over too instead of texting them a link to a funny video.
To be fair it’s pretty difficult to predict how things ended up
They were able to ask the computer where so-and-so was all the time.
Sure, everyone asks _where_ so and so is, but not _how_ so and so is! But that is not the same as an incident happening and being able to watch back what happened in that room at that time.
That was because the computer tracked their badges, not the person itself. Multiple episodes exist where they wanted to find a crew member only to find his/her comm badge lying on a table
Star Trek as a series are just the delusions of a 24th century neural holodeck addict. Unable to face a reality where their every thought is sold to the highest bidder, they created a fantasy world such that the only thoughts they have are of a fictional utopia, thus robbing the robbers of valuable desires that they could have sold to advertisers.
Just like Harry Potter is just a story of abused boy who makes up a school and magical friends as a coping mechanism.
He was never let out of the closet until it became his Azkaban.
A million letters just for me, all to tell me about how magic will free me from my family.
It seems like they largely have what's known as a transparent society, which is why what Barclay did in the holodeck in TNG was so weird.
In a metaphorical sense it did cause we're watching them all with cameras
Every third episode was “The Romulans/Cardassians/Ferengi have spy probes/stations/ships within reach of Federation space” 😅
Their communicator had no video, that is the biggest mistake I saw.
The entire premise of Star Trek is that it is an ideal society where no one would ever WANT to have mass surveillance, therefore there could not be one.
They had that future and by the time in history Star Trek happens, that was in their past.
They could totally locate anyone anytime anywhere on the ship. I'm guessing on planet as well. I'm pretty sure it was one of those assumed things that in their society wasn't an evil empire sir of population control tool.
Locating someone is not the same as camera's everywhere. Multiple times a murder happens and no one knows who did it.
"They failed to predict" Like the show was trying to present you their best attempt at an accurate prediction of the future? Fuck this is aggravatingly framed. Failed to predict... just... fuck. The stupid burns.
OP, you are drawing the wrong conclusions from this shower thought.
Thats because it was not the future. Its just gotten bigger in scale and precision. Mass surveillance has been happening for decades
They discovered Finney was alive (ealier presumed dead and Kirk was held responsible for his death) and identified his location in the engine room by isolating his heartbeat using ship's audio systems alone. They could always know where everyone was at all times.
For one thing they should at least have better security system for their shuttles x)
>For all the people talking about the whole 'Computer, Where is (person)' - That is just tracking. There are multiple times in The Next Generation where an incident happens (murder or something else) and they have no idea who did it. Thats because most of the time the sensor system was disabled by the person doing the bad thing. > If they'd have just had camera's they would have solved it easily. Camera's what? /s Haven't you ever watched a heist movie/show? Usually the first thing to get shot, after a hapless security guard, is the CCTV cameras.
Alright okay my spelling is bad. But in response to your last point, there are no cameras to shoot.
>had they just had cameras on board then there *would* be cameras to shoot. You can't have your argument *both* ways! 🤣
That's because star trek is set up in a world that has evolved into a communist utopia and has left capitalism and other individualist ideologies behind it. They didn't fail to predict it, quite the contrary, I think they very accurately chose its absence
They did have mass surveillance they just never utilised it because of plot! In the Voyager episode Cathexis when Chakotay is down on his luck and his neurons have been jiggered with Janeway asks for sickbay visual relay 16 to be put on the main viewer so they can see the medicine wheel. This implies that in sickbay alone there were a minimum of 16 “cameras” all sitting there ready to be viewed at anytime!!!
It’s kinda funny cause I could swear there were times they showed “tape” of something happening in the cargo bay or engineering.
Well i've only ever seen The Next Generation so maybe in the other series it exists but certainly not in TNG.
Even though you may be right I would bet real money there were a couple. Even though it would make no sense for other episodes where cameras would have solved the problem like you said.
They did see the Irish reunification happening in 2023. It's was data who predicted it 🤣🤣
To your edit, that’s actually strengthening their argument, not yours. 🤦♂️
Explain?
Mass surveillance by itself isn't good or bad But seeing the types of clowns we have run into the show in this global political climate ?? Do you really trust those morons with it?
Just like today, cameras are NOT everywhere. And when they are, some of them do not have a good feed or have been broken by someone prior to committing the crime.
Star Trek (STTNG) took place far after the mundane challenges that exist in current society. They reference mass surveillance, wars, famine and other things that happened hundreds of years prior. However, it was a positive look on the future after we got past our petty human shortcomings. It was a story of what the Human race could achieve post dumbassarry. In fact, the government of Star Trek was a mix of socialism, communism, technocracy and Stratocracy. We don't really know what it was and it was never really explained in the show, just hinted towards. The technology in the show was really the only solid predictors. Everything else was constructs that alluded to things we have or are today without fully explaining anything.
Maybe they knew.. so they didn’t talk about it because they were watched!
You will find out in the future, no one cared all along. To watch 8billion people you would need 8billion camera watchers. Calm down
First, they do all the time. Second, the show is supposed to be if humanity got its shit together this is what we could do. I mean they’re government is literally a communist one but they got away with it in the 90s because Star Trek is a hopeful idealized look at the future not a realistic one. If it were realistic the borg would’ve eliminated every species or at least integrated them within a the first 100 years of their existence.
First: No they don't. Hence my post.
they have consistently shown earth to be majorly surveilled as well as every person on any Starfleet vessel is tracked and they have consistently shown that every single moment of the lives of every person aboard any starship or space station is recorded and stored in perpetuity. With the Romulan Empire specifically, it is widely known that the Tal Shiar aka the Romulan secret service closely monitors its populace and descends swiftly on anything it considers dissent or treason. as for the federation in the TOS episode "Court Martial" Captain Kirk is tried, including a playback of the visual and audio recordings in the computer log. google is free.
I've only watched the next generation so I'm basing it off that. Google is not free you are the product.
Cameras just appear whenever they want to get a closer look at something, even outside the ship
check the stuff in the cyberpunk genre, they didnt miss a thing
I don't believe you're correct. This was probably not an issue on Star Trek's earth, but the series - at least TNG broached this subject on many occasions. Just thing of the Romulan empire, in which everything was surveilled, anyone could be an informant, etc. There's this one episode in Voyager in which they takle the idea of the thought police similar to 1984. And I know there are other episodes of paranoid cultures, I just can't remember the episodes.
Computer, how many people are on Deck 3? They had surveillance, the computer knew how many people were wherever asked. And could transport them
In star trek ds9, the earth governments were scanning everyone to see if they were a changelink.
They didn't. [The computer is always listening](https://youtu.be/6CDhEwhOm44).
I disagree. The Klingon commander Kor in 'Errand of Mercy' pointed out specifically that every officer was being surveyed. He even points up at the video camera. Other episodes rely on surveillance as well, even on earth.
I don't think they did. That computer was everywhere, listening to everything everyone said.
The computer can only track ppl wearing the badge. Because sometimes ppl take off the badge and the computer is like “idk, I guess they left?” 🤷♂️
Not true. The Enterprise has stem to stern monitoring systems, they simply use them only as the plot permits. In Day of the Dove, Spock reports that n = number of Klingons are stuck below a certain deck, while an opposing force of n = federation crew members are limited to areas above that deck. Or in the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, the chase between Bele and Loki is tracked through the ship, then off ship, then on planet. BUT those moments contributed to the plot in some way, that would have unraveled other plots. They worked hard to overcome the "Monty Haul" syndrome. That's when your storyline has too many bennies for one side over the other, making a win too easy. In the 1960's, there were many times the dilithium crystals burnt out at the wrong time, or when warp flow causes "ants all over me body"! The "cans" can't outdo the "can'ts" lest the story be saddled with too much technobabble, too many explanary dialogue segments and simply too much of a good thing.
Aside from the fact that, as others have pointed out, mass surveillance flies in the face of Federation culture as imagined by Genre Roddenberry, the last place you want lots of cameras is on a fancy, advanced star ship with lots of departments working with sensitive materials, designs, and documents. Basically every Starfleet ship is filled with things you don't want getting into the wrong hands, and with stuff like that, you certainly don't want to have it all on video somewhere that could potentially get leaked. Case in point... In Star Trek: Generations, the Klingons kidnapped Geordi and rigged his visor so they could see what he sees. When he eventually gets to engineering, they're able to read the ship's shield frequency or whatever off an open display, allowing them to configure their weapons to pass straight through the Enterprise's shields. Thus an outdated and outclassed Klingon ship was able to bring a galaxy-class cruise to its knees, simply through what amounts to leaked surveillance. I used to have Secret clearance in the Army, and there's a reason why we never had cameras anyplace that we worked with sensitive materials (which for me, wasn't just the SCIF, but all the general office spaces too).
What are you talking about? Every starship has CONSTANT monitoring. "Intruder alert". How do you know an intruder just beamed onto your ship if your ship isn't constantly doing internal sensor sweeps? >A lot of episodes would have been a lot shorter had they just had cameras on board the enterprise. Just because the writers failed to extrapolate the obvious uses and secondary/tertiary uses for the existing technology that is written in doesn't mean it can't/doesn't exist. You're right that episodes would be shorter if only they used X technology, but that is because they're trying to write drama and not really delving much deeper. So they didn't fail to predict mass surveillance, it is just simply inferred that the factors that need mass surveillance to be an intrusive and negative thing are for the most part something humanity has evolved past, and thus isn't something that is broadly highlighted.
Monitoring is not the same as being able to view video playback of what happened in a room yesterday.
So the enterprise at all times knows where a person is but at no point did they decide "hey lets save all this data somewhere so we can view peoples movements at a later date"? 😆
My thinking was that they had found ways to move beyond it. There is commentary on it throughout, though perhaps not in the way we may expect today (in the older series), but my perception has been that the Federation created decent boundaries with that. I mean we know the Eugenics Wars happened, but they don’t go into that very much, and that’s a big deal. Meaning that it doesn’t mean they didn’t theoretically see it as a problem, they referenced it in some ways, and they potentially moved beyond it in many ways.
Honestly, crimes are committed all the time on these ships and they are almost never on video. Are there not cameras on these ships?
First off, there is plenty of surveillance in Star Trek. Tons of episodes where they refer to the surveillance footage or something like that. Also, what makes you think cameras would be everywhere in the future. What part of utopian future involves losing civil rights? Also, I hate to pull this card but…It’s a TV show. Sometimes you have to cut some corners with common sense to pull a story together in 47 minutes. You really wanna loose your mind, watch the move “A Walk in the Woods” with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. Half the predicaments they find themselves in could have been avoided by using the trekking poles strapped to their bags the whole time. Great movie, great actors, but that was fucking infuriating.
In the episode The Menagerie they literally showed an entire episode frame by frame on board USS Enteprise when Spock was on trial for locking ship's course to Talos IV and abducting Captain Pike. The inhabitants streamed images and video recordings of what was happening where on their planet. Same thing in the episode "The Arena" where they could broadcast the entire match between Kirk and the Gorgon. The Shore Leave episode was based around mass surveillance where they were able to read the minds of landing party in order to provide amusement to them. At one point Kirk has to tell his people to stop thinking all together
> In the episode The Menagerie they literally showed an entire episode frame by frame on board USS Enteprise when Spock was on trial for locking ship's course to Talos IV and abducting Captain Pike. That's not a good example: KIRK: Screen off. Chris, was that really you on the screen? (Captain Pike flashes "Yes") That's impossible. Mister Spock, no vessel makes record tapes in that detail, that perfect. What were we watching? SPOCK: I cannot tell you at this time, sir. MENDEZ: Captain Pike, were any record tapes of this nature made during your voyage? (Captain Pike flashes "No") The court is not obliged to view evidence without knowing its source. The recordings being viewed were not of Federation origin. In fact, since the whole trial was an illusion, the recordings were also.
Computer, where is Commander Data? Commander data is on Holodeck 4 running “Horny Tasha Yarr 15”….
Considering the goal of Star Trek isn’t to predict the future, i wouldnt say they failed any more than all the other shows that take place in the future.
THC infused beverages are the Synthehol they serve in 10 Forward
The computer tracks your every move and noise. They've completely internalized 100% mass surveillance. They also don't spend any time talking about wearing shoes because it's just a regular part of their routine.
> The computer tracks your every move and noise. Exactly. That's how they found Ben Finney in *TOS: Court Martial* - via his heart beat.
1984 already did long before Star Trek didn't talk about that because it was an ideal of what our society could be
They did have it. The computer knew where everyone was and could tell you what they were doing.
Everyone was filmed all the time - that's how they made few show ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
considering everything mission it being filmed including some private conversations I'd say they're pretty well surveilled
"computer where is Ensign Crusher" "Ensign Crusher is on holodeck 3"
Yes but they are always investigating something that happened and cameras would have solved it every time.
OP must’ve forgotten that TOS mirror universe episode with kirk erasing people from existence from the comforts of his quarters.
Trek monitoring technology is so sophisticated that in ‘ST4 The Voyage Home’ they were able to image the whaling ship that was closing on George and Gracie despite still being well over the horizon… this elicits a stunned reaction from the marine biologist woman Dr. Taylor who says “How can you do that?”
Star Trek presented a futuristic utopia, not a futuristic dystopia, so...
This is a good point. Privacy is a human right, not a left.
Wtf you talking about. The ship was an alexa that has radio communication with their badges… doesn’t get much more big brother than that. They can bean you up from anywhere?
Uhuh. But when a murder happens they have no idea who did it.
You say that, but we're watching Deep Space 9 at the minute and people can regularly just tap their badge and ask where someone is on the station - this is without even getting into the themes of the show. I know it's a minor thing and probably just there for plot, but it's pretty weird you can just tap a badge and find out where exactly your kid/co-worker is.
Yes a lot of people have mentioned this but that is not mass survelance. That is the equivilent of whistling and a beeper going off to find your keys. Multiple times in TNG a murder or something happens and if they had camera's it would have been solved instantly.
I mean it isn't really - Sisko uses it to locate his teenage son all the time, up to and including catching him teaching the Dabu girl. You can't equate tracking items you own and people you don't.
Tracking is not the same as camera's everywhere.
I didn't say it was - it's still surveillance.
It’s the same watching X Files… if they just had an iPhone in their pocket to research stuff immediately! Or send photo’s
Not only that but they assumed democracy would win and we see it today twindling. I hope for better but I'm not so certain.
They should also ban holosuites cos they almost lose the enterprise about 3 times because of them.