Now that almost all the walls have ears, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re surrounded by actual prison walls or not. The jailers come to you. From a new Spiegel Q&A with Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, a public figure in a time when that description has come to mean something else:

“Spiegel:

Why are you put under such manic surveillance? There are more than a dozen cameras around your house.

Ai:

There’s a unit, I think it’s called ‘Office 608,’ which follows people with certain categories and degrees of surveillance. I am sure I am in the top one. They don’t just tap my telephone, check my computer and install their cameras everywhere — they’re even after me when I’m walking in the park with my son.

Spiegel:

What do the people who observe you want to find out, what don’t they know yet?

Ai:

A year ago, I got a bit aggressive and pulled the camera off one of them. I took out the memory card and asked him if he was a police officer. He said ‘No.’ Then why are you following me and constantly photographing me? He said, ‘No, I never did.’ I said, ‘OK, go back to your boss and tell him I want to talk to him. And if you keep on following me, then you should be a bit more careful and make sure that I don’t notice.’ I was really curious to see what he had on that memory card.

Spiegel:

And?

Ai:

I was shocked because he had photographed the restaurant I had eaten in the previous day from all angles: every room, the cash till, the corridor, the entrance from every angle, every table. I asked myself: Gosh, why do they have to go to so much trouble? Then there were photos of my driver, first of him sitting on a park bench, then a portrait from the front, a portrait from the back, his shoes, from the left, from the right, then me again, then my stroller.

Spiegel:

And he was only one out of several people who follow you?

Ai:

Yes. They must have a huge file on me. But when I gave him back the camera, he asked me not to post a photo of his face on the Internet.

Spiegel:

The person monitoring you asked not to be exposed?

Ai:

Yes. He said he had a wife and children, so I fulfilled his wish. Later I went through the photos we had taken years before at the Great Wall — and there he was again, the same guy. That often happens to me, because I always take so many photos: I keep recognizing my old guards.”