Last week, a Dutch artist decided to celebrate Eric Arthur Blair's birthday by placing party hats on all the CCTV cameras on the street. Wikipedia describes 1984 as a dystopian novel; yet the constant surveillance described as a work of fiction in that novel now is a reality. If anything, we've become so accustomed to cameras keeping an eye on every move; we've learnt to ignore them. Cameras decorated with party hats should definitely remind us of the surveillance states we live in. With this, I don't mean that the surveillance is necessarily malign; it can be benign, almost innocuous, that we submit to such surveillance willingly, and appreciate the results that such surveillance presents. In fact, everything that we do is tracked and studied. Go to a grocery store and buy stuff using a credit card, and the store tracks exactly what you buy, and knows with great certainty what you'll buy next. Search for something on the net, and Google will hound you with ad...