Prisoners living under these towers never know whether the guards are looking at them, but they have to assume that they are being watched. This setup, Foucault explained, is a powerful metaphor for modern civilization: Our lives are circumscribed by a fear that invisible authorities have us in their sights. Two new books about state surveillance in the 21st century, one focused on China and the other on the United States, make it clear that Foucault was right. In China, as Minxin Pei explains in “The Sentinel State,” a centralized Communist government uses new tech to extend a centuries-old system of bureaucracy that rewards intelligence gleaned from informants and spies. And in the United States, Byron Tau’s “Means of Control” documents how a federal democracy formed shady alliances with private companies to collect data on its citizens.

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Persons: Byron Tau, Minxin Pei, Michel Foucault, ”, Jeremy Bentham, Foucault, Byron Tau’s “ Organizations: Alliance of Tech, American Surveillance, Byron Tau THE, “ The Sentinel State, Communist Locations: China, French, United States, “