Or recording. All of this smacks of a police state and I fear we are headed in that direction. Surreptitiously recording a person's private conversations is an assault on individual liberty and free speech.
I lived two years in a communist country. What is happening here is very similar to how the communists were able to control and intimidate free expression. Any anti-government remarks in private or in public were subject to retribution. Children were encourage to report on their parents.
NSA has shown that we have the technical means to invade the private domain of speech and written correspondence. How far will we go in this realm? And can we just dismiss any protection of our free right of expression if the targeted individual is privately a bigot or racist?
you should write a book on those parralels- show how what we are seeing now is the same as what you saw then