> ...only have to fuck up once. Make one mistake and you're nicked mate. It's not illegal to be against surveillance. Nothing I can be "nicked" for. No drugs,

> ...only have to fuck up once. Make one mistake and you're nicked mate. It's not illegal to be against surveillance. Nothing I can be "nicked" for. No drugs, nothing illegal. I am a hard target unless your benevolent watchers want to break the law and plant something on me. And there's plenty of others like me. > People trying to avoid surveillance leave holes in the dataflow that pinpoint them. Yes, that's why I specifically mentioned "active" measures and Ad Nauseum. When surveillance becomes pervasive, you change your strategy. The idea is to become "human chaff". Light up all the keywords, all the dashboards. Make yourself incredibly visible, ideally in a way that blends with the identities of others so they aren't even sure who you are. And most importantly, make yourself both interesting and expensive to target. This provides cover so the people doing the important work on crypto, distributed encrypted comms, etc can go on unbothered. And it's perfectly legal. > My point is that the Ubiquitous Surveillance system must be recursive to prevent it's own abuses (or we will wind up with techno-dictatorship.) That's all. Better hope that you're wrong. If your "exponential" surveillance were successful (it won't be), it would inevitably draw in more and more people who seek power for power's sake. The systems will eventually become corrupted, even if it takes decades. The techno-dictatorship will happen. And then, fortunately, it will eventually collapse under its own weight like all dictatorships do, after oppressing and killing countless innocents. (The model for this is the former GDR, which was the most successful surveillance and control state known to man.) The only way your benevolent surveillance state could possibly work is the emergence of a general AI that takes over our governance systems and replaces human control. I'm not optimistic about this happening any time soon, and as there's no guarantee that such an AI would even care about us, I'm not too keen on seeing this happen in my lifetime. You are making the same mistake that nearly all starry-eyed futurists do. Human nature rules the development and use of technology, not the other way around. We could have walked on Mars by now, but we haven't. The Internet could have brought about world peace and free global exchange of ideas, but instead we're slowly entering a new cold war. There's a reason for that.