3 ms·

There has never been a time, except for short periods, where the ruling class has had full access to what everyone has been saying or thinking. There has always

There has never been a time, except for short periods, where the ruling class has had full access to what everyone has been saying or thinking. There has always been constraints on how much they can know about the populace. Distance, cost, manpower have all been age old constraints. A new technology usually makes it easy to monitor but then something else comes in the way to block it. I think Stasi are probably the only real-successful blanket monitoring.

jacquesm 5y ago
Even the Stasi didn't manage to get everything, but they made a very impressive effort and a Stasi like entity with today's technology may well achieve the panopticon that they were shooting for able to suppress dissent before it hatched into something actionable. Their main tool? Snitches. The tools we have made are quite dangerous for this and that's one more reason why we as the techies responsible for the creation of such tools should ensure that this can never ever happen. It's also one the reasons why Phil Zimmermann is one of my personal heroes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann