I fear that absolute surveillance is an inevitability, no matter where you live, or how "free" your country is. It works like this: Best case scenario, you liv

I fear that absolute surveillance is an inevitability, no matter where you live, or how "free" your country is. It works like this: Best case scenario, you live in a country with a functioning republic, in which anyone is free to vote in anyway they choose. A politician's worst nightmare is to be the one who was overseeing during an instance in which security disastrously failed (e.g. a terrorist attack). The irony, of course, is that no matter how much security there is, a terrorist attack can always be successfully carried out in some manner or another. Further, even if the government ran out of traditional hardened terrorists to oversee, they would start morphing dissidents into terrorists. So no way to stop terrorist attacks, and an ever-growing pool of terrorists. It bears repeating: you cannot stop security threats. Period. That said, a politician's only recourse is to do something. That unfortunately means increasing security. No politician will ever stand in front of a camera and say, "You know what? I think we did everything we could, and these things are just going to happen from time to time. We'll learn from this and try to do better next time, but no guarantees. That's life." It's a truth, but we know that's not what politicians are here to tell us. The other side of this tragic playing out of events is that, following a standard bell curve of distribution, most people are of mediocre intelligence, at best. That means they can't, for themselves, critically come to the understanding of the aforementioned maximum security problem. That means they're going to vote for the guy who promises to do more about security threats with straightforward security lockdown. They don't have the patience or intelligence to understand real policy reform that might actually lead to more security. It's a feedback loop that will cause any bipartisan republic/democracy to inevitably succumb to a dictatorial-style surveillance state. Do away with bipartisanship? There might be a way, but no elected leader in the US will ever implement the changes to make it happen, for the other evil politicians commit is to maintain the status quo at all costs.