They asked me whether I would talk to the media and I said I didn’t know. They asked me who I was writing for and I said I didn’t know, who could say where this would end up, maybe Glimmer Train, a literary journal. I do not know why, when stressed, my instinct is to become more annoying. “Glimmer Train,” wrote the special agent on his special pad. They conferred away from me. The sun beat down and I continued to think about fine lines. “Who in the media will you speak to?” an agent asked for the third time. “I am the media,” I said grandly. To my surprise, they liked this answer; it involved a definable category. I was then turned over to a third jurisdictional authority, military police. I do not know how much time all of this took. I only know that in that thirty minutes or hour or two hours something shifted, because as I sat on that patch of grass I looked not at the building but at the parking lot. I looked at the cars: Jettas and Camrys. Thousands of regular people worked here. Thousands of middle-class people drove from their homes every day and parked here and went home and never told their mothers where they’d been. The eye is not always a metaphor. Surveillance, of course, is made of us.

Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, in “Surveillance Is Made of Dogs”