![]() ![]() He saw a pair of eyes, and he thought they were his own-until one of them slowly winked at him.Įdward Snowden, late in the pages of his memoir, Permanent Record, describes his sensation at being personally introduced to XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s ultimate tool of intimate, individual electronic surveillance. ![]() He turned the binoculars around and looked through the object-lenses. But who was watching? Who was the real observer? ![]() ![]() He realized that he was only another performer in humanity’s great circus, and he had just done one of his acts, just like the others. The least disturbing of what Quintero surveils is what’s now called cosplay the most extreme consists of giddy ritual murder, and of the deliberate calling-forth of a Satanic, sexually violent “smoke-demon.” On the last page, Sheckley’s parable attains an existentialist clarity: the binoculars grant a vision of a shabby, middle-aged man in a dreary room, standing on his head, with a pair of binoculars awkwardly wedged against his face. When he peers through the experimental device just so-an effort of contorting his body into increasingly bizarre positions-Quintero is suddenly granted visions of other human beings, behind closed doors, doing “what people do.” Which turns out to be, well, weird shit. The binoculars turn out to have a fabulous capacity not only for seeing through walls but also for diminishing the distance between Quintero and those he would spy on. Edward Snowden illustration by Joanna Neborsky ![]()
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