With Closed-Circuit TV, Satellites And Phones, Millions Of Cameras Are Watching

My guest Robert Draper says one of the greatest threats to our democracy is gerrymandering, in which the party in power in a state redraws the map of election districts to give the advantage to that party's candidates. Since districts are redrawn only every 10 years following the census, gerrymandering can almost guarantee that the majority party will stay in power. There are a couple of gerrymandering cases currently before the Supreme Court. Draper has reported on gerrymandering, and we'll talk about that a little later. First, we're going to talk about his new article "They Are Watching You - And Everything Else On The Planet" published in this month's National Geographic. It's about state-of-the-art surveillance from closed-circuit TV to drones and satellites and the questions these surveillance technologies raise about privacy. As part of his research, he spent time in surveillance control rooms in London. And he went to a tech company in San Francisco whose mission is to image the entire Earth every day. Draper is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. So let's start with surveillance. Why did you choose England as the place to report on surveillance? ROBERT DRAPER: Well, England has become kind of an obvious focal point to talk about surveillance. It's become, in a way, a petri dish for the subject, I suppose, for a couple reasons. First of all, the U.K. is where George Orwell wrote his dystopian classic "1984" back in 1949 when the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the USSR were his prime reference points.