ABSTRACT
Since the disclosures of whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013, everyone has known that the United States possesses global information and communication technologies tools for the purposes of far-reaching surveillance. This chapter aims to underline the fact that the model in question has been built by theoreticians and activists whose perspective is far from an empirical approach and expose the unsatisfactory features of the State-centric surveillance model before stressing the existence of social self-surveillance prior to the birth of the State and its enduring nature. A good indicator of the efficiency of the security delivered by the State is to be found in crime statistics, although the figures for ancient times provide only a rough order of magnitude. In the digital world, the ways of managing security and doing business have changed profoundly and are now both highly dependent on data.
