United States | News & Politics

I'm not an American or live in the US but I did live in the UK (which is even more into civil society surveillance than the US) and as I come from a country which was once a dictatorship complete with a secret police and political prisioners, I've always been wary of surveillance because it's a lot easier for Democracy to be subverted (as became clear with the Snowden revelations) and even crumble (as we see right now all over the West) than people think, and even the most innocuous activities might put you in a list of enemies of the State (I'm pretty sure my membership of a Ecologist organisation and a small Leftwing party would more than suffice) so best avoid getting your activities tracked and recorded for all eternity in some database.

There is no such thing as a good bulk surveillance system, even if done with the best of intentions (itself something that is doubtful, given that what is actually done with those things is invariably hidden behind a cover of State Secret, so the watchers just watch themselves, a recipe for abuse which most politicians are educated enough to be aware of) would still run the risk of later being abused when people with not so good intentions got their hands on all that data of what people had done before recorded by the "good intentions" people.