Surveillance generally means a loss of the moral high ground, and an indication a culture has entered a transitional political period. Sorry to continue the cy

Surveillance generally means a loss of the moral high ground, and an indication a culture has entered a transitional political period. Sorry to continue the cynicism but what's a modern state that doesn't engage in surveillance? Here in the US, phones have been bugged by the cops at times since phones existed. And I remember in the Art of War, Sun Tzu advised his reader to essentially surveil the enemy as much as possible. Which is to say states have employed secret agents against the enemy and employed them against their own once the state grew large enough to view the people as yet another potential enemy. The one way your statement pans out is states whose surveillance becomes obvious tend to be weakened to some degree. And I'm personally against surveillance, I'm not trying to justify it.