The Panoptic Sort: Surveillance Q&A with Oscar Gandy Professor Emeritus Oscar H. Gandy, Jr.’s groundbreaking book “The Panoptic Sort” (Westview Press, 1993) led the way in directing our attention to the surveillance activities of commercial firms. Other publications at the time were focused on the privacy concerns of individuals, but Gandy’s book helped us understand what was at stake when the bureaucracies of government and commerce gathered our personal information and used it to manage social, economic, and political activities. Oscar Gandy. (Image: Annenberg School for Communication) Here, Gandy discusses how surveillance has changed over the last three decades, what risks it poses, and what we can expect in the future.