Surveillance protects us – surveillance controls us: Whether we regard surveillance technologies and practices as either a safeguard of or a threat to individual freedoms and liberal societies is heavily shaped by long-standing and powerful narratives. This is particularly the case for digital technologies, as the value-laden expectations that are projected onto them combine modernist and Enlightenment ideas with traditional Judeo-Christian motifs. As will be argued, they form the foundation for political, journalistic and scientific discourses interpreting digital surveillance as objective and omniscient, capable of laying bare the truth about the individual self, offering God-like providence, an omnipotent, even manipulative force.
