Surveillance StateLevels
Surveillance State: four story levels and seven more places
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After dark
A night run through the city, putting out the cameras and drones before they read you.
Why here City streets at night are where you first meet the machines. Every one of them is a real kind of equipment.
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The avenue
The same streets by day, with the top hats riding through and a helicopter on your tail.
Why here The machines do not switch off when the sun comes up. Daylight is also when the top hats come out, and they are the ones you came for.
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Child Predator Island
A coast road round a private island where the guests wear masks, ending at the boat launch.
Why here The people who have everyone else watched keep a place of their own where nobody watches them.
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Escape
The way out by speedboat, with gunboats and helicopters coming after you.
Why here There are no cameras on open water, so they send gunboats and helicopters instead.
The four story levels unlock in order.
Seven more places
They open as the story is played and change nothing in it.
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The fusion center
A grey-morning district full of plate readers, ending at the fusion center itself: take out its four uplinks and the whole network goes dark.
Why here This is where the pieces are put together. Fusion centers are real: about 80 offices in the United States where local, state and federal agencies pool what they hold.
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The superstore
A no-fire zone: you ride a motor cart down the aisles with an RF blaster that only stops machines, and nobody can be hurt.
Why here The watching is not only on the street. In December 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced an order barring a pharmacy chain from using face recognition for surveillance for five years, saying its system had falsely flagged shoppers as shoplifters.
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Mansion row
A coast road of big houses at midday, with a camera on every gate.
Why here Money buys its own cameras. Homeowners’ associations buy plate readers that log every car coming in and out. A 2023 news investigation counted more than 200 that had, and the cameras can be linked to a network that police search.
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The county road
Farmland at sunset, where the only things out there are fields, cows and plate readers.
Why here Some readers are made to look like something else. A 2025 Associated Press investigation found the Border Patrol watching drivers along highways with plate readers, often hidden in traffic barrels, one of them more than 120 miles from the Mexican border.
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The country club
A golf course that scans every guest and flies its own drones.
Why here Private places can run watch lists of their own. The owner of a famous New York arena banned lawyers from firms with lawsuits against it, and reportedly used face recognition at its doors to turn them away.
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The data farm
Open desert with readers hidden in the scenery, and at the end of the road the data farm where it is all kept.
Why here Everything that is collected has to be kept somewhere. The National Security Agency built its biggest data farm on a desert foothill south of Salt Lake City; how much it can hold is classified. The false cactus is real too: an Arizona town put some of its plate readers inside fake ones.
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Low orbit
The same road a long way up, with the planet turning underneath.
Why here They watch from up here too. One commercial fleet of small satellites photographs nearly all of the Earth’s land almost every day, at about 3 metres per pixel: sharp enough to show a building, not a person.
Sources
Where the “Why here” lines state a fact about the real world, this is where it comes from. More about the machines themselves is on the Learn page.
- The fusion center: United States Department of Homeland Security, “Fusion Centers”
- The superstore: Federal Trade Commission, press release of 19 December 2023 on a pharmacy chain’s use of face recognition
- Mansion row: The Intercept, “License Plate Surveillance, Courtesy of Your Homeowners Association”, March 2023
- Mansion row: Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Things to Know Before Your Neighborhood Installs an Automated License Plate Reader”, September 2020
- The county road: Associated Press, “Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns”, November 2025, as republished by KPBS
- The country club: New York State Attorney General, press release of 25 January 2023 on face recognition used to deny entry to venues
- The country club: NBC New York, report of 19 December 2022 on a lawyer turned away at the door
- The data farm: NPR, “Amid Data Controversy, NSA Builds Its Biggest Data Farm”, 10 June 2013
- The data farm: FOX 10 Phoenix, “Hidden cact-eye: Paradise Valley responds to the controversy”, 20 May 2015
- Low orbit: NASA Science, page describing the commercial satellite fleet whose pictures it buys
Last checked in November 2026.