Cameras stare as you browse at Barnes and Noble or rent a video at Blockbuster. They record the way you handle the merchandise at Macy's or how you glide to the music at the Union Square Virgin Megastore. Grab latte at Starbucks, and cameras are watching every sip you take. Peering from skyscrapers with lenses that can count the buttons on a blouse three miles away, they watch every move you make.

With little public awareness and no debate, the scaffolding of mass surveillance is taking shape. "I feel like Paul Revere, shouting 'The cameras are coming, the cameras are coming.'" says Norman Siegel, the New York Civil Liberties Union's executive director.

All summer, a crew of NYCLU volunteers scoured Manhattan on a mission to pinpoint every street-level camera. Next month, Siegel will unveil their findings: a map showing that cameras have become as ubiquitous as streetlights. It's impossible to say how many lenses are trained on the streets of New York, but in one eight-block radius, the NYCLU found over 300 in plain sight. And as one volunteer acknowledges, "There are tons of hidden cameras we didn't catch."

That's because it's routine in the security trade to buttress visible cameras with hidden ones, "so everything's covered and it doesn't look like a fortress," as one consultant says. If you listen to the people who install them, cameras are as common and elusive as shadows.

New York is hardly the only spy city. More than 60 American urban centers use closed-circuit television in public places. In Baltimore, police cameras guard downtown intersections. In San Francisco, tiny cameras have been purchased for every car of the subway system. In Los Angeles, the camera capital of America, some shopping malls have central surveillance towers, and to the north in Redwood City, the streets are lined with parabolic microphones. Even in rustic Waynesville, Ohio, the village manager is proud of the cameras that monitor the annual Sauerkraut Festival.

America is fast becoming what Gary Marx calls "a surveillance society," where the boundary between the private and the public dissolves in a digital haze. "The new surveillance goes beyond merely invading privacy … to making irrelevant many of the constraints that protected privacy," Marx writes in Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. For example, mass monitoring allows police to eliminate cumbersome court hearings and warrants. Immediately after a crime, cops check cameras in the vicinity that may have captured the perpetrator on tape.

So, as surveillance expands, it has the effect of enlarging the reach of the police. Once it becomes possible to bank all these images, and to call them up by physical typology, it will be feasible to set up an electronic sentry system giving police access to every citizen's comings and goings.

This apparatus isn't limited to cameras. Recent mass-transit innovations, such as the MetroCard, are also potential surveillance devices. A MetroCard's magnetic strip stores the location of the turnstile where it was last swiped. In the future, Norman Siegel predicts, it will be possible for police to round up suspects using this data. E-Z Passes already monitor speeding, since they register the time when drivers enter tollbooths. Once transportation credits and bank accounts are linked in "smart cards" (as is now the case in Washington, D.C.), new surveillance vistas will open to marketers and G-men alike.

Already the FBI clamors for the means to monitor any cell-phone call. Meanwhile other government agencies are developing schemes of their own. The Department of Transportation has proposed a rule that would encode state drivers' licenses, allowing them to double as national identity cards. Europeans know all about internal passports, but not even the East German Stasi could observe the entire population at a keystroke. "What the secret police could only dream of," says privacy expert David Banisar, "is rapidly becoming a reality in the free world."

What's more, spy cams are getting smaller and cheaper all the time. "A lens that used to be 14 inches long can now literally be the size of my fingernail," says Gregg Graison of the spy shop Qüark. Such devices are designed to be hidden in everything from smoke detectors to neckties.

"Once the new surveillance systems become institutionalized and taken for granted in a democratic society," warns Gary Marx, they can be "used against those with the 'wrong' political beliefs; against racial, ethnic, or religious minorities; and against those with lifestyles that offend the majority."

New York police taped large portions of the Million Youth March in Harlem. Social psychologists say that taping political events can affect a participant's self-image, since being surveilled is unconsciously associated with criminality. Ordinary citizens shy away from politics when they see activists subjected to scrutiny. As this footage is splayed across the nightly news, everyone gets the message: hang out with dissenters and you'll end up in a police video.

But even ordinary life is altered by surveillance creep. Once cameras reach a critical mass, they create what the sociologist Erving Goffman called, "a total institution," instilling barely perceptible feelings of self-consciousness. Deprived of public privacy, most people behave in ways that make them indistinguishable: you're less likely to kiss on a park bench if you know it will be on film. Over the long run, mass monitoring works like peer pressure, breeding conformity without seeming to.

Communications professor Carl Botan documented these effects in a 1996 study of workplace surveillance. Employees who knew they were being surveilled reported higher levels of uncertainty than their co-workers: they were more distrustful of bosses, their self-esteem suffered, and they became less likely to communicate. The result was "a distressed work force."

It's a brave new world. There are thousands of watchers in Spycam City--a ragtag army as likely to include your neighbor as your boss or the police. In 1998, anybody could be watching you.

The Netherlands has set a controversial benchmark for official snooping on all forms of communications. Other countries, namely those of the European Union, may follow suit. On April 2, 1998 the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament approved a new Telecommunications Act that includes a chapter intended, among other things, to force cable operators and Internet service providers to make their networks tappable by the police and intelligence services.

A study, carried out by the scientific research and documentation center of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, revealed in 1996 that police in the Netherlands intercept more telephone calls than their counterparts in the United States, Germany or Britain. In absolute figures, the Dutch tapped three times more phone lines than the U.S. agencies.

If you run any sort of business anywhere in the world, take note--Terrance Thomson may be looking at you right now. More precisely, Thomson may be gathering intelligence from a photograph of your company taken by a satellite nearly 500 miles (800 km) above the Earth's surface. If he is, you are almost guaranteed he was hired by your competition to do it.

The intelligence game has expanded beyond the shadowy realm where the world's spy agencies exist and has gone commercial in the form of competitive intelligence, as those in the profession like to call it. A former Canadian military intelligence analyst, Thomson looks for a whole list of things such as new facilities being built and how much product is sitting in the company's yard. He even compares the number of cars in the employees' parking lot to previous photos to see how many shifts are working and how large they are so he can judge productivity.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine, a self-confessed "electronic nerd" who casually mentioned that the US government recently launched a new satellite into space.

Nothing unusual in this, you might think. But this is no ordinary satellite. When it beams down to Earth, this satellite can read handwritten documents. A great improvement, my friend said, over the existing spook satellites which can only read license plate numbers!

He went on to say that the US government is working on a satellite capable of looking through walls. This should give you pause to reflect when taking a shower!

I was skeptical that things had really gotten so bad, so I decided to do some poking around and called some of my old friends in the "spook business" to see if they could put me in the picture. Below, I outline just some of what I learnt.

Phones. There is an agency in the US which, with the assistance of its sister agency in the UK, can completely blanket the world with its eavesdropping capabilities. The agency obviously doesn't listen to every conversation, but it does listen to and record any conversation containing a key word.

It works like this: You are talking to aunt Sally and you mention that Uncle Ralph's boy, Fred, was recently apprehended for selling drugs. Bingo… "Selling drugs" activates a "key word" computer program and your conversation is automatically recorded.

You can be talking in English, Spanish, Hindustani or any of 120 languages. It doesn't matter: the computer is programmed to be fluent in all of them.

The "Big Ear," as it is nicknamed, will then store your conversation until its content can be filtered through another program. If this program determines your conversation is "significant," a government operative will listen to it and on the basis of what he hears, he can launch further monitoring of your calls or prompt an investigation into your affairs.

The "Big Ear" is not programmed to put conversations into their proper context. So be careful not to use words such as "money" and "laundering" in the same sentence. "Dad sent me some money because I don't even have enough to get my laundry." It is always a good idea to be circumspect when using the phone. You may be using "key words" in a totally innocent manner, but this could still draw you under the spotlight.

Have you ever received complaints from friends that they can't reach you on your private phone line, because it's always engaged? If this ever happens to you, call in a security expert to check your phone instruments. You may be the victim of the Hook.

The Hook is a small, almost undetectable computer chip placed in the telephone. It enables the person who placed it to send a signal down your line. This signal activates your phone in such a way it becomes a transmitter and will relay any conversation held near the phone back to the eavesdropper. In this way, your private conversations can be monitored and recorded from any location in the world. What gives the Hook away is that your phone will be engaged whenever the snoop monitors the private conversations in your home or office.

ZURICH-- Swiss police have secretly tracked the whereabouts of mobile phone users via a telephone company computer that records billions of movements going back more than half a year, the Sonntags Zeitung newspaper reported.

"Swisscom has stored data on the movements of more than a million mobile phone users. It can call up the location of all its mobile subscribers down to a few hundred meters and going back at least half a year," the paper reported.

"When it has to, it can exactly reconstruct down to the minute who met whom, where and for how long for a confidential tête-à-tête," it said.

Some 3,000 base stations across the country track the location of mobile phones as soon as they are switched on, not just when customers are having conversations.

If Robin Hood had lived in the information age, he'd never have escaped the Sheriff of Nottingham. These days They always know where you are and what you are doing.

More than likely They will know your size in underwear and whether it's boxer shorts. They'll know which petrol stations and restaurants you patronize. They will have a good idea of what you have in your pantry and refrigerator, the brand of beer and wine you drink, whether you smoke, what kind of car you drive and how well you look after it.

If you use a credit card or make a call on your mobile phone, the networks know exactly where you are and, to some extent, what you are doing. By studying spending patterns, much may be learnt about your tastes and habits.

All of this and much more have been brought to us by the digital technology that surrounds us and permeates our lives so efficiently that today most of it goes unnoticed and unchecked. It is the iceberg beneath the shining, convenient, everyone-has-to-have-one, plastic tip.

The mechanics of life have changed irrevocably. Where once you went to the bank to get money or drew it from a brown pay envelope, now you take a sliver of plastic to a hole in the wall. Soon even that will go, replaced by a slot in your home PC or your telephone.

Cash is disappearing, even for parking meters. Plastic cards with magnetic strips or, now more commonly, embedded computer chips are replacing notes and coins. Money has all but ceased to exist. Now it's just a digital message between computers.

Ultimately the smart card with its built-in microprocessor is the key to almost everything, from the lock on your front door to proof of identity at the bank or the polling booth. It is the information age ID card and, far from questioning it, we are about to embrace it. Privacy is one of those words going rapidly out of fashion.

(Editor: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name" [Rev.13:16-17].)