Politics & Power Quote by Anne Campbell

A thousand times cheaper is doing more rhetorical work here than any list of locations. Campbell frames a surveillance technology not as a controversial expansion of state capacity, but as a bargain: an efficiency upgrade that any rational administrator would sign off on. The roll call of spaces - government buildings, train carriages, cargo containers, a soldier's lapel - is a map of modern anxiety, moving from the civic to the intimate. By the time you reach the lapel, the sensor is no longer just infrastructure; it is literally attached to the body, normalized as part of a uniform, a duty, a life.

The specific intent is persuasion through practicality. Campbell doesn’t argue the ethics because she’s trying to pre-empt the ethics. Cost, portability, and “potential practical uses” are the softeners that let security policy slide past public debate. The subtext is that if something is cheap enough, it becomes inevitable: we stop treating deployment as a choice and start treating it as baseline modernization.

Contextually, this fits a familiar late-20th/early-21st century political pattern: security technologies pitched during moments of heightened threat perception (terrorism, smuggling, public transit vulnerability), when “doing something” matters as much as what is done. The genius - and the danger - is the way the quote collapses distinct domains (public transportation, logistics, military personnel) into one seamless argument for expansion. Once you accept the premise in one setting, the others feel like mere extensions. Cheapness isn’t just an economic claim here; it’s a moral alibi.