> Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Except, once you start a regime of easy and ubiquitous surveillance, you cannot guarantee that those risks will remain small.
Surveillance is useless without absolute secrecy of who is being surveilled and why. The potential harms of such an institution should be obvious. Which is why American jurisprudence allowed such surveillance only with court orders, or the assent (sometimes after the fact) of special courts like the FISA court.
What we are fighting today is surveillance, through technological means, of everybody all the time. It is therefore absolutely guaranteed that a concomitant amount of government operations and agenda, related to this surveillance, will become secret and unaccountable. At this point, persecution and abuse is not just a possibility, it is guaranteed.
Except, once you start a regime of easy and ubiquitous surveillance, you cannot guarantee that those risks will remain small.
Surveillance is useless without absolute secrecy of who is being surveilled and why. The potential harms of such an institution should be obvious. Which is why American jurisprudence allowed such surveillance only with court orders, or the assent (sometimes after the fact) of special courts like the FISA court.
What we are fighting today is surveillance, through technological means, of everybody all the time. It is therefore absolutely guaranteed that a concomitant amount of government operations and agenda, related to this surveillance, will become secret and unaccountable. At this point, persecution and abuse is not just a possibility, it is guaranteed.