Through the Wormhole

We live under a billion unblinking eyes...

A global surveillance system that solves crime...

Uncovers terrorist plots...

And helps stop abuse of power.

But are we ready for a world without secrets...

...where not even our homes are off-limits

and corporations know our every desire?

Should we say goodbye to our privacy?

Or is it time for the watched to become the watchers?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

captions paid for by Discovery communications

Ever have the feeling you're being watched?

Well, you probably are.

If you live in a large city,

surveillance cameras take your picture

hundreds of times per day.

Every transaction you make is electronically logged.

Scanners at airports can peer through your clothes.

The latest models can even detect your emotional state.

And in those moments when you're not being tracked,

we're busy giving away our personal information

on social media.

We think of our privacy as a fundamental right.

Now it appears to be on the brink of extinction,

which sounds like a nightmare.

But is it?

This footage was shot by the Hawkeye ii surveillance camera

flying two miles above Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.

Once every second for hours on end,

it takes a picture of the entire city.

Here it documents the murder of a police officer

by members of a drug cartel.

But it also captures the movements of the assassins.

It tracks their cars as they leave the scene

and leads the police to their hideout.

Cities around the world

are beginning to use these total surveillance systems.

One could be watching you right now.

Nick Bostrom runs the Future of humanity institute

at Oxford university.

He believes constant surveillance

will radically reshape our lives,

but we won't end up fearing it like big brother.

Nick believes we'll embrace it.

Surveillance technology might be one of those things

that could change social dynamics

in some fairly fundamental way.

Yes, already in urban environments,

there are a lot of cameras looking at us all the time.

So, it's a lot of eyeballs,

but they are kind of semi-isolated.

An obvious next step,

where all these video feeds are stored in perpetuity

and coupled with facial-recognition systems

so you could automatically tag and keep track

of where any individual has been,

whom they have been talking with,

what they have been doing.

That sounds like a bad thing,

but it doesn't have to be.

Think about contagious diseases.

The virus this man is carrying

could spread across the city in just a few days.

It could start a pandemic

that kills tens of thousands.

If you have a new outbreak,

you have SARS or h1n1 or some new disease that pops up,

it gets really important to try to trace

who might have been exposed to the germ.

And it's painstaking work.

You have to interview the people

and try to get who they have interacted with,

and then you have to go and interview those people.

But constant surveillance

could spot the origins of the outbreaks in real time,

locating the infected,

dispatching medical teams to them,

and establishing quarantines.

Please return to your homes.

This area is under temporary quarantine.

Those things obviously can become more efficient,

the more detailed information you have.

So, if you nip it in the bud,

you potentially save millions of lives.

Imagine if every single person you interacted with

were tracked 24/7.

Actually to be able to see

what somebody has been up to in the past.

Have they kept their promises?

There are a lot of jerks and cheaters in the world

who get away with it.

And by the time people wise up,

they have moved on to their next victims.

Kind of nice

to be able to disempower the jerks and cheaters,

and it would encourage more people

to behave in ways that... that are good.

And if cameras tracked you every moment of the day,

some aspects of your life

would become a lot more convenient.

You could go into a shop and just take what you need.

And the camera recognizes who you are

and automatically rings it up to your bank account,

and it's all taken care of.

If you hadn't yet kicked the old habit

of carrying a wallet,

you'd never have to worry about remembering where you left it.

In some ways, it's actually a return

to a more normal human condition.

We used to live in small tribes, small bands.

You kind of know what everybody's doing,

who they are, what they are up to,

what they have been doing in the past.

In some respects, it's not a complete novelty.

It might be more a return to normalcy.

Life under global surveillance

might resemble life in a small village,

but could we adapt to being constantly surveilled,

even inside our own homes?

Most people say they don't like being watched

when they're eating, washing, or doing anything in the nude.

But our homes are already full of cameras,

from security cameras and cellphones

to laptops and tvs.

They're even hidden inside clocks

that keep an eye on the nanny.

You might think these cameras are harmless,

but they all connect to the Internet,

which means they can be hacked.

Cognitive scientist Antti Oulasvirta

lives in Finland,

a country known for notoriously shy people.

They say you can spot an extroverted Finn

because they're looking at your shoes, not their own.

Antti realized his countrymen would be perfect Guinea pigs

for an experiment

to see how people react to having no privacy.

I have a motivation to keep the kitchen clean,

but I have an extra motivation today... this camera.

Antti wanted to see how people's behavior changed

when their homes were wired for constant surveillance,

so he persuaded several households

to do what for Finns is unthinkable...

submit to being watched for an entire year.

We wired 10 households in Finland for 12 months,

including cameras and microfilms and even screen capture.

So, this is Bob,

and Bob looks like a regular piece of home electronics,

but he's not.

B-o-b,

which stands for "behavioral observation system,"

records all the video and audio around the house.

Bob also keeps track of all e-mail, web traffic,

online purchases, and television-viewing habits.

So, we had them covered pretty well in all areas

of ubiquitous surveillance.

We didn't want to bust people for doing anything wrong.

We simply wanted to see how they would react

to not being able to be alone in their own homes.

In the first weeks of the study,

Antti noticed his subjects appeared unsettled

by the presence of the cameras.

They had to keep their impulses in check,

control their shouting.

And if there was a stressful situation

playing out in their lives,

that could amplify the stress.

And... no surprise...

they were sensitive about being naked.

Being naked was, of course, an issue,

and we left them a few spots... for example, bathrooms...

where they could be alone without the cameras.

They were like fish in a fishbowl.

But as time went on,

Antti noticed something surprising.

So after surveilling people for six months,

we asked them to draw us a graph of their stress levels.

They were stressed out in the beginning,

but after a while, it leveled off.

Eventually, the subjects started to relax.

They stopped worrying about being seen naked.

So, the mentality was that,

"now you've seen me once walking around the kitchen naked,

so what's the point continuing to hide?"

And when they really needed privacy

for a delicate conversation,

they figured out how to get it.

They went to cafés to have private conversations,

and they avoided the cameras in creative ways.

Antti's study shows

we can adapt to almost constant surveillance.

He admits that this was a special case.

The subject knew him and trusted him not to share the data.

But to Antti's surprise,

some people didn't care who was watching.

We asked the subjects

who would they least want to share the data with,

and the most striking feature was,

some went as far as saying that,