It was devised for people who are reinventing the tribal rites of the pickup bar, preferring to find one another by telephone, wall-to-wall surveillance cameras and more than 100 monitors.
"This case involves nothing more than off-the-wall surveillance by law enforcement officers to gather information exposed to the general public from the outside of petitioner's home," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissent.
The company's listing and Mr. Li's membership on its board are just the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government's security apparatus.
I looked up at the ceiling and thought about how my friends were sitting in an identical room on the other side of the wall, with surveillance headphones on and a big whirring tape reel in the background.
A small and enthusiastic audience moved our discussion from past to present - and the knowledge that, just down the road in the council offices, a wall of surveillance screens had been positioned in a secure basement to monitor the renegade comings and goings of the borough.
Last week, he escaped his home, scaling a wall, eluding surveillance cameras and the cordon of security in a village near Linyi city in eastern Shandong province where he had been held for 19 months under house arrest.
Drains are implanted directly into walls like surveillance devices.
In this case, the Obama Administration will get even more cover than it has so far for its militarist, pro-Wall-street, surveillance-state, and, yes, even pro-fossil-fuel agenda.
That means detailing every sprinkler system, alarm, door, safe room, generator, guard hut, fence, wall, parking lot, surveillance camera, tunnel, elevator, stairwell, and basically anything else relevant to assessing how government properties will react to threats.
Around one corner you'll find a blown out wall revealing hidden surveillance equipment on flat screen computers, while a hole in another will lead you to a sunken living room with thick shag carpet, a sudden shift into a swingers pad of the seventies.
