The British Secure Beneath Watchful Eyes poster, as seen above. Did they have to make it look like every fake propaganda poster from every dystopian movie ever?
Ads for one program to teach kids to clean their teeth in East Germany involved a cartoony stickman with a camera who would always know if you hadn't been doing what you were told.
The logo◊ of Information Awareness Office. The motto translates to "Knowledge is power".note And they didn't even do the Latin right! Scientia potentia est is preferred. Technically, Latin word order does allow for the wording used, and the order may even be preferred in certain circumstances, but any classicist will tell you that as a standalone motto it is inelegant and painfully obviously a simple kludge from English. The Total Information Awareness project was supposed to combine all of the various US government data mining projects into one big scary monolith and was cancelled within months — for looking too Orwellian.
In EL, thousands of "eyebots" float around the city observing its citizens at all times, even in their most intimate of moments. The observation is part of the "Megaro Earth Project", which aims to restore humanity since this series takes place After the End. While they are ostensibly there to maintain security for the populace, it is shown that some of them have a more sinister purpose...
Psycho Pass has this Up to Eleven. The Sibyl System doesn't just monitor people, it tells them everything they are supposed to do with their life and watches every thought that every person has. You can't even think about committing a crime without having police come to send you to therapy or arrest you and put in an asylum. If the Sibyl System is pretty sure you may commit a crime at one point in your life, you'll just be killed.
In Batman and The Outsiders Annual #1, Well-Intentioned Extremist B. Eric Blairman (inspired by 1984) launches a satellite called the Omni-Cast, which turns every television set in the nation into a surveillance device and allows him to monitor every computer.
Then there was the time Batman himself created the "Brother MK 1"/"Brother Eye" satellite to "observe" all of the supertypes of The DCU.
The Black Dossier, a sequel to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. London is just wriggling out from life under a dictatorial regime; they had in the pubs!
Transmetropolitan is more Big Advertiser. A major plot point revolves around advertisers exploiting momentary 'dead spaces' in the law to pump out ads that are literally poison. The internet had been overtaken by ads as well. To a lesser extent the government tries to take over the major news casters; however the littlest part of the internet that was free broke the story.
In All Fall Down, the Digitized Hacker AIQ Squared is able to monitor all the main characters on a steady basis — to the point of eavesdropping in the Pentagon.
Fan Fiction
Clash Ofthe Elements: Alpha via his Command Sphere, which he uses to monitor every square inch of Plit for the purpose of seeing the heroes' journey and keeping an eye on Cackletta until he joins the group himself.
Fallout: Equestria: the destroyed waste-land is littered with giant propaganda posters from the Ministry of Morale of a of an overly pink pony staring down at the landscape saying "Pinkie Pie is always watching. FOREVER."
Film
In the 1959 Santa Claus film featured on MST3K, Santa has device from space that can watch every kid on Earth. The machine itself is creepy too! It has giant lips! He also has a satellite with a human ear in the center, and a telescope with an eye.
The leader in Equilibrium was called Father. And he suppressed human emotion to maintain control.
Minority Report actually has consumer-based ubiquitous surveillance as a plot point. People can have customized ads targeted at them based on retinal scans-triggered by walking through a mall—and at one point the cops send tiny little robotic spiders to scan everyone in an apartment building they suspect the protagonist is in. Not to mention the premise is that people can be arrested and imprisoned in a And I Must Scream prison simply due to clairvoyants seeing them committing crimes in the future.
In G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the Joes (an international police force) identify the Baroness by using Facial Recognition Software against pictures of every person in the world... an image library built up by secretly copying every digital photograph ever taken by anyone.
The Dark Knight features Batman, driven to the edge in his pursuit of The Joker, using a machine that turns every cell phone in Gotham into a sonar imaging device. Batman himself cannot use the device. Only Lucius Fox can, and his disgust at such methods is why Batman chose to give control of it to him. Luckily, at the end of the film, Batman reveals the machine is rigged to self-destruct after it's used to capture the Joker.
San Angeles in Demolition Man. Subverted in that most of the populace is more than eager to live under this surveillance.
Discussed and actively defied in the first Cube by Worth. He reveals that he worked on the construction of the Cube, but when the other characters question who is ultimately responsible and secretly controlling and watching their lives, he explains that there is no leader, and the Cube is a public works project without a purpose, operating under the pretense of a grand plan. He caps it off with "Big Brother is not watching you."
Richard Vickers in Creepshow has a thing for cameras, including using them in the murder of his wife and her lover.
The Bible has of course God, which makes this trope Older Than Feudalism. Contrary to what people such as Adam, Eve, and Jonah have hoped at various times, nothing is out of sight of Heaven... according to modern interpretation. In the Old Testament, it's very clear that Yahweh is not very omniscient, with him finding out about the Original Scene being a quite hilarious instance.
"[...]and said unto him, Where art thou?" (Genesis 3:9)
Literature
Big Brother, who is still watching, from 1984 is, of course, the Trope Namer.
From 1921, twenty-eight years before 1984, comes Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, set in the One State, a nation almost entirely built of glass, allowing the secret police to spy without needing cameras.
The whole point of Kafka's short story "Before the Law" in the book The Trial.
And perhaps inverted in the parable "An Imperial Message", where the King is ultimately barred from contact with the narrator/average person. Of course, given that both of these stories are written as parables(even in context) about God/meaning/identity in modern life/solitude(and what it might mean to be solitary in a modern society) rather than description of a panoptic state leaves the applicability of this trope open to question.
IT, from the A Wrinkle in Time. IT definitely existed and was watching, no question at all about IT.
The Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, even though he can only see you when you wear one of his rings.
UNICOMP in This Perfect Day didn't bother watching people with cameras, but it did require that they touch their nameber bracelets to scanners whenever going through a door, so that UNICOMP always knows where everyone is at all times. Thought Control was accomplished through a system of mandatory drug treatments, genetic engineering, and weekly visits to an "advisor", a sort of combination psychotherapist, parole officer, and father-confessor.
AM in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. He's quite honest about wanting the characters to suffer. But they'll suffer his way, think his thoughts, and play his . As he watches them. Forever.
Once Katniss and Peeta become contestants in The Hunger Games, cameras are waiting to capture every move they make.
While not exactly a surveillance device, The Great Gatsby has "the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg," a prominent ophthalmologist whose billboard advertisement features a gigantic pair of eyes with glasses over them.
In Matched by Ally Condie, the Society watches most things people do. Even their dreams are recorded for irregularities and to gather statistics. The telescreens are called "ports" here.
MC in Domina tracks people by the GPS in their phones. She means to get permission, but forgets.
The Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter, especially Delores Umbridge.
The Poul Anderson short story "Sam Hall" had the government doing, among other things, tracking where everyone in the country was from day to day. It all falls apart when the the system fails to track down the title character, who is completely fictitious and was added into the system by the protagonist as a joke.
Played with in Larry Niven's short story Cloak of Anarchy. People in an "anarchy park" are allowed to do anything except direct violence against another person: if someone does that, the ever-present hovering "copseyes" stun both the aggressor and the victim, knocking them unconscious. The "played with" part is that someone figures out a way to knock out the copseye network. Turns out real anarchy is pretty unpleasant for everyone who isn't fairly strong physically and/or a sociopath.
The planet Kegan in The Fight for Truth, part of Jedi Apprentice, has a very small population and only one city. Its rulers, the Benevolent Guides, implemented increasing levels of surveillance to keep things running smoothly. Qui-Gon Jinn finds that intensely detailed records are kept of people even in their own homes - who they talk to, what they say, what they write and to whom. But children abducted for standing out - having a chronic illness, being Force-Sensitive, questioning the propaganda they're fed - have their records removed.
Played with in Charles Stross's Halting State and Rule 34, where cameras are omnipresent, but facial recognition technology is stated as being too processor-intensive to be useful in real time. However, your mobile phone can track your location anywhere it can get a signal, and makes a great listening bug if it is hacked. Also, the police are watched even more closely by Big Brother than any of the criminals are, being required to have cameras on their body running at all times to "Life Log" their time on duty for the official record.
Played with in the WWW Trilogy by Robert J Sawyer. On one hand this trope is invoked in-universe by several characters who are uncomfortable with Webmind's emergence, however it is ultimately subverted; Webmind does have the ability to observe anything within range of a camera with even the remotest Internet connection and is able to access anything online, password or no password (not to mention having an apparent inability to understand the concept of privacy), but they only use their abilities to help humanity.
iCarly: One of the new policies in the episode "iHave My Principals".
The alternate universe Manservent Neville from The Middleman episode "The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome." Notable because it turns out that the alternate Wendy Watson is The Man Behind the Man.
Arguably, those camera-speakers that pop up out of the ground on Teletubbies.
Firefly was an ironic inversion of this. Big brother was a big nuisance to "Big Brother".
Persons Unknown: There are security cameras constantly watching the captives.
There is a The Benny Hill Show sketch that plays with this trope. A couple would be lying on the bed watching the late night newscast (the newscaster is Benny Hill, of course), and would roll over and decide to start getting amorous. Unknown to the amorous couple, Benny could see what they were doing from the other side of the TV. Benny would start staring and making rude noises in the middle of his newscast, then would call over the weatherman, cameramen, etc. to gawk and ogle at the couple (and they'd all pretend everything was normal when the couple would look up).
A hilarious version in Sherlock. Sherlock's big brother works for the government, and yes, he is watching. What? He's concerned.
The omnipresent and plentiful security cameras in the New York City of the Person of Interest universe, which ends up making NYC look like London.
Leave It To Beaver: The squeaky-clean 1950s sitcom had an episode alluding to Big Brother — 1962's "Lumpy's Car Trouble," where Wally breaks the rules for borrowing Ward's car for a track meet; he allowed the driver, Lumpy, to take a "shortcut" on the way home, causing damage to the exhaust system. One of Ward's co-workers sees the boys push the car along the highway and tells Ward. That evening, Ward confronts the boys and after Wally admits what happened, refuses to reveal his informant. Ward's reasoning: By not knowing that person's identity — and thus, being able to track down and question him about what he "might have seen" — the boys will always be on their best behavior, because someone might be watching.
Everything in the Blake's 7 Federation is taped, logged, and recorded in triplicate. Woe betide you if one of those recordings shows you conspiring or plotting or thieving or, I don't know, passing a political criminal the salt. You will vanish and no-one will remember you ever existed.
The morality of the Machine is examined in detail: on one hand, the Machine was specifically designed to detect acts of terror and has averted several, and the protagonists are secretly able to use it to help the helpless; on the other hand, everyone involved with the Machine, including it's creator, is scared witless by the Orwellian potential, and the US Government department who oversees the Machine isn't squeamish about getting rid of those who discover its existance. To this end, when Finch created the Machine, he specifically designed it so even the government couldn't access the hardware or software, preventing them from using the Machine for anything other than its original purpose.
In The Last Enemy, the protagonist, a mathematician played by Benedict Cumberbatch, comes back to London after 4 years in China to discover this trope in full effect. In fact, he is asked to be the spokesperson for a new computer system (called Total Information Awareness) meant to monitor everyone in order to keep the citizens safe. Hell, he has to go through a security checkpoint with a metal detector and an X-ray just to enter a church. The ending also reveals that the disease affecting only Arabs was meant as a form of bio-tagging to further enforce this trope.
Pet Shop Boys' "Integral" is about a dystopian police state where everyone has a number and is constantly being spied on by government computers, written as a Protest Song about the proposed government ID cards in Britain.
Spoofed in The Burkiss Way, in the episode "Love Big Brother The Burkiss Way": Here, Big Brother Is Up Your Nose, and indeed he mocks his opponent in the "Big Brother elections" who claims they're going to watch people instead. Everyone under Big Brother's rule talks as though they have stuffed up nostrils: Winston Smith's act of defiance is to speak normally.
"Winston! How can you speak like that with Big Brother up your nose?"
"Oh, blow my nose! Don't you see, Julia? Big Brother isn't up my nose! He never was up my nose! He's not up anybody's nose! He's not even up your blowhole!"
The extremely well-loved Big Finish Doctor Who episode "The Natural History Of Fear" revels in this trope. Every scene starts with people watching a recording of the previous scene. Many of which include people telling each other they're not being recorded. The effect is deeply unsettling.
In Misspent Youth by Robert Bohl, a game where you play a group of teenage anarchists out to change the world, the group creates Systems of Control that are sci-fi-ish details about the world that The Authority uses to mess with your lives. These frequently include universal surveillance.
Warhammer 40000's Adeptus Arbites (think if Judge Dredd worked for Big Brother), as seen on the quotes page. And the Ecclesiarchy, ever-vigilant for signs of heresy, and who'd like to remind you that The Emperor is watching. And the Inquisition, though if you've caught their interest you're pretty much screwed. Even the Tau Empire gets in on this, to help them fit in with the setting.
Feng Shui's 2056 juncture, in keeping with 1984-style dystopian fiction, is all over this trope. The Buro uses bugs called Loyalty Roaches which are basically genetically-engineered roaches with miniature cameras and microphones to monitor the populace for signs of traitorous activity. The "ecologically safe" pesticides of 2056 won't kill those things, but bug sprays from the contemporary juncture do a bang up job on them, and are a nice sideline for secret warriors who operate in 2056.
Mage The Awakening: The Ministry of Panopticon of the Seers of the Throne. Their purpose is described as twofold. Use Space magic and advanced surveillance equipment to monitor and control the flow of information, and release just enough of what they learn through this into the public consciousness to create a pervading sense of paranoia, which will alter how people will act (if people think they are constantly being watched, then they will not act in a manner they don't want others to see). Their symbol is, of course, an enormous eye.
In Shadowrun, everyone is near-constantly being monitored - but it isn't the big scary government that's watching. It's the big scary Megacorps. Every transaction you make, every ad you show interest in, your habits, your demographics, everything about you is observed and filed away so that they know how to get you to buy more stuff from them. Only if you make them lose money will they give a damn about you otherwise.
...And they suck at it. See, the big thing about private ownership is that they loathe loaning out information to other megacorps, which becomes a problem when one of those corps is Lone Star. Add that to the interdepartmental rivalries, the hackability of camera networks, and the fact that most runners have two braincells to put together, and a runner can be halfway across the continent after Mr. Johnson (a term for an anonymous employer) has erased all record of transactions.
Exalted has the Orb and the Scepter, two mighty artifacts that can be (and one of them is) used to control the population of a great city-state by making them perfectly obedient to the laws and orders of the ruler. Those who disobey get punished (based on the severity of their crime) by pain, agony or horrifying death, and all of this is inescapable. The population even has a magical eye-shaped mark on their left hand, and there are proclamations of "His eye is always upon you" everywhere in the city. There are also laws on dress code, with bright colors being forbidden for anyone who is not a memeber of the aristocracy. Veeeery creepy...
In Eclipse Phase most of the solar system has embraced sousveillance. Rather than the government watching everyone everyone watches each other, including the government (assuming the habitat even has one). Naturally this often proves inconvenient to Firewall sentinels, fortunately there are ways around the lack of privacy.
The Jovian Junta, being the most authoritarian faction left in the system, plays this trope very straight on the other hand.
Videogames
I Robot has an eye of the Big Brother watching the Unhappy Interface Robot #1984 above of the incomplete pyramid. If it catches the robot jumping, it'll zap the robot to pieces.
Averted in Portal. The Vital Testing Aparatus is crucial to your success, and is not monitoring you at all. Please do not destroy the Vital Testing Aparatus. In addition, Aperture Science must also note that the windows overlooking all testing chambers are not used for observation purposes either. After all, how could the scientists observe you if all of them are dead?
You can get achievements by breaking down security cameras.
Episode 3 of the Back To The Future adventure games features First Citizen Brown, whose face is put on every poster in town and seems to rule the town with an iron fist, with hundreds of surveillance cameras. Then it turns out that he's a misguided Reasonable Authority Figure and his wife has been deliberately playing this image up to keep everyone in line.
In Mass Effect, The Batarians seem to have this kind of society. They are known have an extensive propaganda program, travel within their space is highly restricted, and the Batarian worlds you can visit are all noted to be circled by spy satellites on the lookout for "enemies of the State."
Deus Ex Human Revolution has (at least) a sly little Shout Out to this trope, in the form of a security camera labelled "Big Bro Security Systems" in an opening cinematic.
In fact, if you look closely all of the security cameras have this label. Fridge Horror, perhaps?
While poking around the ruins of Washington D.C. in Fallout 3 you can explore a demo Vault, in which the audio guide assures you that if you're "Concerned about security? Our Eye-On-You camera allows the Overseer to watch your every move. You'll never be alone again!" There are also the mysterious Eyebots roaming the wasteland, blaring patriotic music and propaganda about the Enclave, and which can sometimes be spotted silently staring at people.
Vega Strike has these posters (in one Loading Screen) for Confed IntelSec. Sleep well, citizen! The image moved around a little, but according to metadata was made in 2003 (see Real Life section for possible inspirations).
Dangan Ronpa: Everything that happens in Despair Academy occurs under Monokuma's watchful eye, and messing with his many cameras is a punishable offence.
Also, after most advanced technology fails during the Collapse (magic disappearing from Stark, which likely enabled this tech in the first place), everyone in the world has to go back to older tech. In order to prevent another Collapse, the Eye demands that all electronic devices be connected to the Wire, a worldwide network, which can be easily used to monitor devices. It is highly illegal to hack your device (e.g. cell phone) to block any Eye spyware, although a lucrative market exists for the hacks.
Dm C Devil May Cry features a human world being controlled by demons who spy humanity.
The intro to Vector shows a highly-totalitarian conformist society, with the government watching and controlling everyone. When the protagonist has had enough, he throws his headphones (which also serve as a form of ID) on the floor and runs away. The whole game is about him running away from the Thought Police.
Webcomics
Nobody Scores: in one series, the NSA produces a tentacled, many-eyed machine that is installed in your home and tracks everything about you for marketing purposes. It also detects terrorists "before they happen". People buy them quite willingly.
In Gunnerkrigg Court, Jack thinks the Court puts tracking devices in food. So he's now starving himself to slip under the radar. As it turns out, he's absolutely right.
Devil's employees do this among other duties. Blue devil girl likes soul audits! She only doesn't like the part where she runs into a VIP and gets interrupted by the boss — who seems to watch her in turn (actually he didn't, she ran into view on her own).
The six Flash videos about the Vahki enforcers, more than any other piece of media in the series, depict Makuta's reign (when disguised as Turaga Dume) like this. And they weren't shy about it, with taglines like "Turaga Dume sees all — Thoughts can be dangerous" or "Obedience is happiness".
Later touched upon in the web serials, when Makuta took over the entire Matoran Universe. Or rather, he became the universe, gaining control over the very forces of nature, and of course supervision over his entire body.
Western Animation
The Simpsons: Springfield became like this in one episode when they hired a man from Great Britain to install cameras all through the town. Ned Flanders was employed as one of the monitors and soon has the Big Brother complex. In fact, in his My God, What Have I Done? speech, he lampshades it by saying that he just wanted to be a Little Sister instead of a Big Brother. And he, along with Homer, go about the cityshooting the cameras with shotguns.
In a Treehouse of Horror story Homer jumps from one Alternate Universe to another, in one of them Ned Flanders uses methods that fit this trope as "overall lord and master of the world".
In The Powerpuff Girls anniversary special, Buttercup's fantasy of how the world would be if ruled by her included a propaganda titled "Big Butter is Watching You" where she threatened to punch anyone who didn't follow her rule.
I see what you did there...Remember: just because you finished reading the article doesn't mean we're not still watching you.
