Commentary
London is a city synonymous with so many things: bad weather, great music, mediocre food, a colorful prime minister, Buckingham Palace, and cameras. Yes, cameras. More specifically, surveillance cameras supplied by companies with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Of course, one cannot discuss surveillance without discussing Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and designer of the panoptic prison (later used by the French essayist and philosopher Michel Foucault). In short, Panopticism suggests that we, the people, can never really know whether we are being surveilled or not. When the watchers become invisible, locked away in their panoptic (as well as ivory) towers, we can’t see them. But they can see us….