Also, I would contest this:

Never before has the government had so much power.

I feel that the legitimacy of governments is collapsing and power is going to corporations, in a hurry.

In other words, we got so busy worrying about direct government spying we let a handful of corporations completely take over the information sphere, instead.

I’m rewatching Person of Interest, and it hits so different now.

That post 9/11, Snowden, surveillance-state-fear era almost feels… quaint.

It started much earlier, it is just now affecting more people.

I would not be surprised if black americans historically would consider the US as authoritarian, atleast until some place late last century.

FYI: I am caucasian

Those who choose security over liberty shall enjoy neither.

Very true.

I do agree that wire tapping is an important escalation and that authoritarianism becomes more effective the more you can spy on people.

But “it all started with” can imply causation, and i don’t think we can blame surveillance tech for the boiling pot of authoritarianism.

Nothing as big as a global trend can be mono-casual. I suspect that big things like resource scarcity/bounty, social inequality, aggregate stress levels in society, etc are also important in turning up the heat on that pot.

I think of it as a temporary asymmetry: the government sees us, but we can’t see the government. Just like corporations can see what we are doing, but we are not looking at what they are.

Eventually, information and visibility will be total, since the cost of producing it and distributing it are low. Then we’ll know when we are being wire tapped, by whom, and why. We just haven’t put the systems in place, yet, to make that happen. We are also strangely slow about demanding it.

Sort of like what’s happening with Flock: massive invasion of people’s privacy, but also an audit trail that has been revealing abuse on the side of the watchers. More of that audit trail, hopefully, to come.

I forget the name, but there was an NSA analyst who described the Internet as the greatest intelligence gathering system ever invented.