The Circle

between pedestrians passing
     near the camera, unawares.
    “And of course most of the cameras can be manipulated manually or with voice recognition.
     Watch this. Camera 8, turn left.” On screen, the camera’s view of the Cairo street
     panned left. “Now right.” It panned right. He demonstrated it moving up, down, diagonally,
     all with remarkable fluidity.
    The audience applauded again.
    “Now, remember that these cameras are cheap, and easy to hide, and they need no wires.
     So it hasn’t been that hard for us to place them all over. Let’s show Tahrir.”
    Gasps from the audience. On screen there was now a live shot of Tahrir Square, the
     cradle of the Egyptian Revolution.
    “We’ve had our people in Cairo attaching cameras for the last week. They’re so small
     the army can’t find them. They don’t even know where to look! Let’s show the rest
     of the views. Camera 2. Camera 3. Four. Five. Six.”
    There were six shots of the square, each so clear that sweat on any face could be
     seen, the nametags of every soldier easily read.
    “Now 7 through 50.”
    Now there was a grid of fifty images, seeming to cover the entire public space. The
     audience roared again. Bailey raised his hands, as if to say “Not yet. There’s plenty
     more.”
    “The square is quiet now, but can you imagine if something happened? There would be
     instant accountability. Any soldier committing an act of violence would instantly
     be recorded for posterity. He could be tried for war crimes, you name it. And even
     if they clear the square of journalists, the cameras are still there. And no matter
     how many times they try to eliminate the cameras, because they’re so small, they’ll
     never know for sure where they are, who’s placed them where and when. And the not-knowing
     will prevent abuses of power. You take the average soldier who’s now worried that
     a dozen cameras will catch him, for all eternity, dragging some woman down the street?
     Well, he should worry. He should worry about these cameras. He should worry about
     SeeChange. That’s what we’re calling them.”
    There was a quick burst of applause, which grew as the audience came to understand
     the double-meaning at play.
    “Like it?” Bailey said. “Okay, now this doesn’t just apply to areas of upheaval. Imagine
     any city with this kind of coverage. Who would commit a crime knowing they might be
     watched any time, anywhere?My friends in the FBI feel this would cut crime rates down by 70, 80 percent in any
     city where we have real and meaningful saturation.”
    The applause grew.
    “But for now, let’s go back to the places in the world where we most need transparency
     and so rarely have it. Here’s a medley of locations around the world where we’ve placed
     cameras. Now imagine the impact these cameras would have had in the past, and will
     have in the future, if similar events transpire. Here’s fifty cameras in Tiananmen
     Square.”
    Live shots from all over the square filled the screen, and the crowd erupted again.
     Bailey went on, revealing their coverage of a dozen authoritarian regimes, from Khartoum
     to Pyongyang, where the authorities had no idea they were being watched by three thousand
     Circlers in California—had no notion that they
could
be watched, that this technology was or would ever be possible.
    Now Bailey cleared the screen again, and stepped toward the audience. “You know what
     I say, right? In situations like this, I agree with the Hague, with human rights activists
     the world over. There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There
     needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness.
     And to this end, I insist that all that happens should be known.”
    The words dropped onto the screen:
    A LL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN .
    “Folks, we’re at the dawn of the Second Enlightenment. And I’m not talking about a
     new building on campus. I’m talking about an era where we don’t allow the majority
     of human thought and action and achievement and learning to escape as if from a leaky
     bucket. We didthat once before. It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks,
     everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar
     time, when we’re losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it
     doesn’t have to be that way. Not with these cameras, and not with the mission of the