It’s not the same thing that Underdog used to do when he went to the TV Studio where Polly Purebread was a reporter and looked through the lens of the television camera and used his superpowers to be able to see everything that was going on in range of the TV sets tuned in at that time.

The concept is that you collect information as to exact what information they have collected about you, so that you know exactly what information they have. It would be very hard for any entity to make a case that you would not (in a non-governmental, non-judicial or non-national secuity context) be entitled to have this information, other than “it would cost too much if we had to provide that information to everyone who asked.”

“No, you are not entitled to a complete listing of everything that you purchased in our supermarket during the last calender year as a result of user our Saver Club card to get discounts.”

“No, we’re not going to tell you how many times you drove through a specific automated toll booth using a transponder so we could automatically extract the toll charges from your bank account.”

Assuming that enough political pressure was brought to bear to require dossier compiling entities to provide this information to the targets of the data collection, then the cost of doing so would be a limiting factor to the data collection. This has already occured in some narrowly specific areas. The abuses that occured in the early 1970s by Credit Bureaus and Bill Collectors resulted in the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. These laws regulate the entities operating such businesses and put an end to such abusive practices as notifying ones employer regarding an alleged debt that is gone to collections. We’ve seen the beginnings of such a revolt from the revelations of the numerous security breaches at banks and data brokers.

Watching the watchers makes the watchers rather nervous and uncomfortable. One can do some experimentation to verify this. Select a target suveillance device that can be observed while standing on public property. The device should belong to a private-sector entity so as not to run afoul of some obscure Governmental regulation. A surveillance camera that’s mount on the front of a large office building in a downtown area that is privately owned is an optimal choice. Ensure that you are standing on the public portion of the sidewalk, or just in the public street and begin to surveille the target device. At first just look at it very carefully with the unaided eye. It also adds to the effect if you have a companion with you with whom you appear to be conferring about your activities. Take out a pad a paper and start making notes regarding the target device. The take out a pair of compact binoculars and resume surveilling the target, while your companion takes notes of your observations.

Finally, ask your companion to hand you the camera. The camera should be fitted with something that is quite obvious to be a telephoto lens. Have your companion take out the video camera and start surveilling you surveilling the target surveillence device. It probably will not take long once the camera comes out and you start taking pictures before some uniformed person or person in a dark suit dashes out of the building and demands to know what you are doing. Since the video camera is rolling and you are not trespassing on their private property, you can now start having fun having unnerved this buildings ‘watchers’.