Well you should be. This new series exposes information about the tools of espionage and assassination that have been used by various governments around the world dating back as far as the early 1900's. While I am sure that a lot of this information is dated and is nothing for the average person to get all worked up about it kind of makes you wonder what it is that they are doing now.
Like a lot of people out there that try to stay at least a little bit up-to-date about my security and privacy, I take some measures to not have a massive online footprint so to speak, but there was a time that I didn't feel that way. I would say that this notion changed in my mind starting a few years ago.
Lately, with the way that the big tech companies have been exposed for how it is that they use the information that we all willingly give up by using their products, I have become even more concerned about it.
This series doesn't focus on private industry all that much, but it does show the various tools that have existed and likely still do exist on the tracking of all the citizens of the planet in the name of "safety." It also exposes all of the extensive lengths that certain government bodies, namely focusing on USA and Russia, will go to in order to maintain their position in the power struggle.
The reason why it makes me worry even more is that I believe that private industry is far better at all of this than governments are in this day and age.
I already get called "paranoid" by my friends and even some family members about how I wont communicate via certain messaging systems and I destroy the RFID chips in my passport and driving license but I just don't like the idea of being tracked, even if it means that I am going to take a bit longer any time that my card or passport is being scanned.
But when you are watching this series, you will encounter certain things that if you aren't at least a little bit worried about, you probably should be. One of the things that caught me off guard and I really don't like is that one person interviewed said that there is a reason why the hallways leading into many immigration areas are so compact and it done this way intentionally even though it seems stuipd and inconvenient to those of us that queue up in them. It is designed this way to put you in range of a scanner that will automatically read the chips in your credit cards or ID cards to see where you have been and to see what you have been up to. They don't go into great detail about this and they might be acting a bit* melodramatic. This doesn't change the way I feel about it though.
For me some of the episodes were better than others, and I wouldn't really consider the entire series to be terribly binge-worthy, but it is a bit of an eye-opener to any of you folks out there that fear that the information age might not all be a good thing. I worry about this sort of stuff, and I am not even terribly important.
Should I watch it?
I think that it is a very speculative show that might be unnecessarily get some people worked up but at the same time it also details some of the very dirty things that our governments have done throughout the ages as far as spying is concerned. The thing that worried me about the information in this show is that some of the people that are tracked or spied on are very protected leaders of nations. If they can do it to them, how easy would it be for them to do it to you.
This show wont be for everyone, but I found it more entertaining than a lot of the series that Netflix has been releasing lately. I didn't watch every episode but rather looked at the titles and brief descriptions to see which ones would interest me the most. I think that most other people should probably do the same.
