Alas, many "champions of privacy and freedom" push the nebulous notion that dark outcomes can be prevented by passing laws against this or that elite looking at this or that kind of information. In other words, by restricting information flows.

For a decade, I have challenged such folks to name a time, in the history of humanity, when that general approach has ever worked for long at keeping elites blind, let alone in a world where cameras and databases proliferate like crocuses after a rainstorm. No one has ever come up with a single major example, of any kind, ever. Yet, they would bet our future freedom on that nebulous approach.

As Papa Heinlein said: "The chief thing accomplished by Privacy Laws is to make the [spy] bugs smaller."

The alternative concept - to look back at them and watch the watchers via sousveillance or counter-transparency - is a hard sell, because it is counter-intuitive and easy for elites to propagandize against. And yet, it is the essence of what the Western Enlightenment has used as its tool set for achieving the miracles of the last 300 years. (I explain this concept in The Transparent Society and illustrate it in Earth.)

Looking back... or upward or sideways... is what John Locke and Adam Smith and James Madison et al recommended in order to create the reciprocal accountability that keeps abuse of power in check.

All of the main Enlightenment systems - democracy, markets, science, and justice courts - rely upon transparency-enabled reciprocal accountability to operate. To achieve their positive sum games. Games that benefit us all far better than the older (and more naturally human) zero sum games that emerge out of simplistic human nature.

As the tools for both surveillance and sousveillance proliferate, we are entering a time of choice between two potential equilibrium states: 1) a perfect Orwellian (or more-likely Huxleyan) hegemony, empowered by universal elite omniscience; or 2) a wide open citizen-driven society, empowered by sousveillance and universal omniscience.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no Pollyanna. I know that the latter might go sour, as portrayed in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and I explore possible drawbacks in some chapters of The Transparent Society! There are many potential failure modes inherent in mass citizen empowerment and ubiquitous accountability.

But one thing we know from 5,000 years of recorded history - and evidence that goes back farther still - is that option 1 is guaranteed to be calamitously wrong. (Indeed, an oligarchic attempted putsch is currently underway.)

Moreover, as I point out in The Transparent Society, general omniscience does not automatically mean an end to privacy! In fact, it is logically the only way we can preserve some.

The real question is, can enough of the world's citizenry be radicalized for transparency-based accountability to ensure an end to corruption and to make our growing institutions work well, world-wide? I depict such a radicalization in Earth. But mass populism appears to be deliberately steered in other directions, right now.