> I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. The brea

> I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. The breadth and depth of surveillance that you can do on the average modern person with electronic monitoring is unprecedented in all human history. Reading somebody's letters does not begin to compare. There is not an "established social contract". They got a massive spying windfall, beginning with wiretapping, and then exploding when practically everything anybody did was recorded in a machine somewhere. The changes in the last 20 or 30 years have been overwhelming. There's no "150-year social contract" on their side, but there are several hundred thousand years of established balance of power on our side. The powers these people want to "retain" are things they didn't have for long enough that it could be intertwined with the biological evolution of the species.