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Cycling to the library this morning, my movements would have been tracked by many CCTV cameras.

Britain is one of the most watched societies in the world.

But if I'm not doing anything criminal, why should I worry?

What counts of surveillance and what, if anything, is wrong with it?

Philosophy Bites has been carefully monitoring Tom Sorrell for his views on the topic.

Professor Sorrell has received two major European research grants to investigate the ethics of surveillance.

Tom Sorrell, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much.

The topic we're going to focus on is surveillance.

Could you just say at the beginning what surveillance is?

Well I think we would consider surveillance to be the observation of people by other people sometimes using technology.

Observation, I can watch somebody across the street am I engaged in an act of

surveillance at that point? Perhaps not. You'd probably be engaged in

surveillance if there were specific questions you wanted to answer in the course of your observation

and if you were targeting your observation on a particular person or maybe a particular set of people

or maybe the occupants of a particular space.

Yeah, it strikes me that surveillance is often systematic.

There's a sense that you keep a record you're trying to answer a question as you say,

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