These historical examples of the libertarian critique of computation provide only a sliver of the rich historical tradition of popular culture in questioning the potential threats to personal liberty posed by technology. Although, as we have seen, these warnings vary widely in the clarity and complexity of their arguments, it is worth bearing history in mind as we consider contemporary issues in government intelligence gathering via computational and networked systems. Left out of this brief survey is a large number of subsequent pop culture treatments of issues of surveillance that were created post-1980. However, most of the basic technological tropes -- and the critical modes used to address them on film and television -- were already well established before personal computers came to dominate our understanding of the basic relation between humans and computers. As suggested by John Seeley Brown and Mark Weiser, the age of ubiquitous, networked computing in fact more closely resembles the mainframe age partly because of the social dynamics of computer users. Instead of each person using only a single computer, in both the mainframe and "ubiquitous" computing eras, multiple humans share the use of any given computer at any given time. Although we are still in the period of transition (2005-2020) identified by Weiser and Brown (1996, 4), my hope is that this survey of popular culture of the mainframe era will help illuminate and inform discussions of data privacy sparked by Prism and the seemingly less ominous current cultural fascination with "big data" and its interpretation.

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