Surveillance turns any departure from a person’s habit into a potential death signal.

Evidence

Each and every person has a particular form or pattern of life. Your daily actions are repetitive, your behavior has certain regularities. For example, you rise at roughly the same hour and regularly make the same journey to work or elsewhere. You frequently meet up with the same friends in the same places. If you are placed under surveillance, it is possible to record all your movements and establish a spatiotemporal map of all your usual doings. Furthermore, by intercepting your telephone calls, observers can superimpose your social network upon this map, determine which are your personal links, and calculate the importance of each one in your life. As an American army manual explains: “While the enemy moves from point to point, reconnaissance or surveillance tracks and notes every location and person visited. Connections between those sites and persons to the target are built, and nodes in the enemy’s network emerge.” Once this network of places and links in your life is established, it will be possible to predict your behavior: if it is not raining, on Saturday you will probably go jogging in a particular park at a particular time. But an observer may also perceive suspicious irregularities: today you have not followed your usual route, and you have met with someone in an unusual place. Any interruption of the norm that you yourself have established by your habits, any departure from your regular behavior, can sound an alarm bell: something abnormal and therefore potentially suspect is happening. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how drone technology transforms psychic and moral space — mundane daily life itself becomes the metric by which a death sentence is issued. — connects to: Activity-based intelligence replaces identity and files of data become death warrants; Permanent lethal surveillance imposes psychic imprisonment, not just physical harm.; Surveillance capitalism extracts behavioral surplus to predict and modify behavior. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 73
• SEED: Essay angle: the inversion where routine becomes the norm that condemns — how ‘pattern of life’ analysis turns boredom into evidence punishable by death.