luck favors the prepared.

Walking down the hallway, laughing out loud with my friends, I suddenly stopped my steps after a glance at an object hanging down from the ceiling: a candid camera. With its one eye, it was facing directly at me and my friends. Perceiving my actions, reading my lips–these were what the camera was doing. With a strong, abrupt uncomfortable feeling, I refused to act as myself. Yes, I stopped being Dabin, yet started to act as a machine that performs restricted actions forced by school.

In one science fiction movie (with a title that I cannot remember), one of the main characters reveals top government secret: the satellites will be soon used by the government to observe actions of each citizen. When I heard it, I gave a snort of laughter. Invasion of privacy, I would call it. Yet with candid cameras watching over me, my friends, everyone in school, I started to think of it as a quite reasonable theory. If international schools where the authorities claim to respect their students start to invade their privacy, it only proves that the authorities suppose human nature as evil and unworthy of trust.

Although the original purpose and intention of the cameras are to prevent certain misbehaviors of students, it still feels like being a prisoner in panopticon–a specially designed prison where everything can be seen by observers.