Attack Surface (Assumption of constant surveillance)

Somewhere, a computer was watching this call just as I was watching myself. Maybe neither of us had been compromised and all it could see was that Tanisha was talking to me and that I was talking to her, old friends linked by nothing more than shared history. Or maybe it had full access privileges to every word and every breath, ingesting feeds from our cameras and mics, rooting stealthily through our filesystems for stored credentials and logs.

This fact was something I had lived with on both sides, and I knew that the way to deal with it was to pretend it wasn’t there—to act as though everything were fine and normal, like phones were things to let you talk to your friends, not to let anonymous strangers watch and judge you. You had to pretend this because otherwise you became a terrible person, paranoid and angry all the time, and you made your friends’ lives terrible. (p. 71).