While drones have played an increasingly prominent role in America’s military and surveillance operations – at home and abroad – lesser known is the growing use of this new technology in civilian life. Some of these applications are far less sinister than one might expect. For Jason Lam, owner of San Francisco’s first personal drone shop, the aerial crafts could just be the latest and most exciting wave in the field of digital photography. 

Vietnam specializes in irony. Its president, Truong Tan Sang, visited the White House this Thursday, where he was expected to request a lifting of the U.S. ban on lethal weapons sales to his country, while also seeking support for a bid to join the UN Human Rights Council. The irony? Besides trying to buy weapons from the United States, a country it defeated four decades ago, Hanoi also continues to trample on human rights.

While previous modes of discipline were more hidden and implicit in state control, the development of CCTV could be identified as a shift to a physical, identifiable sign of mass surveillance that has been developing for several centuries. This explicit form of surveillance certainly hints at ominous trends in Western society, which has sparked countless Orwellian allusions to Big Brother, but it may also offer an opportunity for change.