> No matter the cost governments and big business will unite in using mass surveillance to monitor and control the population.
The cost has almost always been ~0 for gov officials performing unnecessary surveillance.
I trace this low cost back to news orgs. Most editors & journalists opt out of honoring their extra constitutional protections because they don't serve as an adversary to the powerful. Instead they favor publishing sportsball or celebs or parroting gov/corp/leo pr without any analysis, etc.
We don't know how officials will behave if they have to pay a persistent, meaningful cost for surveilling us. We've never tried it.
> We don't know how officials will behave if they have to pay a persistent, meaningful cost for surveilling us. We've never tried it.
To try that, step one would be making people aware of what's even happening. As you say, news orgs are failing us all.
Assange and Snowden took Step One toward that end... And were made an international example of. The institutions and news orgs who ought to have been their main support failed, and even turned on them in most cases.
The cost has almost always been ~0 for gov officials performing unnecessary surveillance.
I trace this low cost back to news orgs. Most editors & journalists opt out of honoring their extra constitutional protections because they don't serve as an adversary to the powerful. Instead they favor publishing sportsball or celebs or parroting gov/corp/leo pr without any analysis, etc.
We don't know how officials will behave if they have to pay a persistent, meaningful cost for surveilling us. We've never tried it.