In it, a government agency, “Public Oversight” has monitoring devices installed everywhere, including places we’d consider private. Freedom is maintained by imposing extreme restrictions on what Public Oversight can do with the data they collect. They release all kinds of information in aggregates, to do what we, today, do with surveys and focus groups. Any specific information, however, is only released on a need-to-know basis, and they decide who needs to know (and almost nobody has such a need).

In the novel, a police officer requests information about a suspect. Public Oversight refuses to disclose the information, but provides some other, seemingly trivial, piece of information, saying that normal police work can produce all the remaining evidence needed to solve the case.

A very interesting system, even though we all know it could never exist in reality without being completely abused by a government that would use it to become a tyranny.

Don’t let them have any nuclear weapons.