Agree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities, but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied equipment

Agree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities, but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied equipment that made it possible for WW2 Germany (did I dodge Godwin's law?) to collate evidence of ethnicity at a scale not known before, with disastrous results [1]. I think that to some, surveillance often looks like a way to get the efficiency of distributed decision making while keeping central control (which has definitely been the philosophy behind China's economic experiments of the past 30y). But historically, it has arced towards enforcing centralized organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the tech involved - and that pattern has proven both bad for a population and self-defeating for regimes. [1] http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html