The clipper chip idea flopped, right? So have a few other stupid, draconian, privacy-defeating bills since.

But yeah, it may not be realistic to think that we can stop the expansion of surveillance powers for TPTB and erosion of rights for the average citizen, given the consistency and persistence of the proponents of such crap. When I look at trends of the past 20 years, it seems like wherever the law has fallen short of placing everyone under a microscope, private industry has conveniently stepped in to become the 1984-telescreen service providers instead of the government.

Corporations are the governments private enforcement contractors. They’ll control the internet and we’ll work for them, and they’ll work for government.

See! Government involved in your life!

Nice job building a firewall between society and government control.

At the end of the day it’s all people. The semantic bubbles do nothing to change its all just people looking to externalize effort to live simpler themselves.

"the government" is not one person with a concrete ideology, it is an amalgamation of hundreds of people who all want different things and are theoretically beholden to their voter base.

"The government", like any other large corporation, is an entity in and of itself, and not a mere aggregation of the people who run it. It has institutional culture etc, and given what it is, said institutional culture tends to lean heavily towards a highly centralized, hierarchical approach to anything it perceives as a problem; and tends to perceive anything that threatens the applicability of this approach as a problem in its own right.