> It's not that "the government" feels entitled, but rather that surveillance - even and especially the very limited, court-approved, kind - is essential to law

> It's not that "the government" feels entitled, but rather that surveillance - even and especially the very limited, court-approved, kind - is essential to law enforcement. As in dismantling organized crime and preventing terror attacks. This isn't actually true, though. It may be essential to enforcing the law at the level we have come to expect. But that is sort of my point: whatever governments are given, they will come to depend on. Once a capability has been granted them, it can never be taken away. For instance, let's say someone builds a mind-reading app, that records everyone's thoughts so we all have cool thought journals. Of course it needs to store these journals in the cloud, because why not? This will immediately be used by law enforcement to prosecute crimes. And why wouldn't it be? Everyone's thoughts are literally right there for the taking, sitting in an AWS datacenter somewhere. Once this becomes the norm, it'll quickly be made illegal not to journal your thoughts, using the exact same reasoning you just elaborated. It will have become essential to the enforcement of law that police have this tool. And the people saying that will be right - the removal of that tool will represent a degradation in law enforcement capability, no question about it. We just have to decide which kind of society we want to live in. Sometimes the price of freedom is more crime. In a democratic society, it's up to us to choose how much of each.