The implications of having a giant mass of data that includes everything done by everyone is just too awful. Actually, the implications of having such a mass o

The implications of having a giant mass of data that includes everything done by everyone is just too awful. Actually, the implications of having such a mass of data are complicated but not necessarily awful. Let's speculate. Suppose a publicly accessible database of everything everyone does were available to everyone. Then the NSA could do all its ineffectual terror spying and you could watch the NSA people doing it in real time. Your brother in law could watch you watching the NSA and then switch to watching his favorite basketball team discussing its strategy for the upcoming game in their locker room because he finds your NSA obsession boring. Is such a omnipanopticon world awful? It would be different, certainly. There would be little crime and terror but you wouldn't be able to keep private secrets, either. Nobody could be blackmailed because nobody could keep any embarrassing evidence hidden. Every intersection would be a red-light camera. The various drug laws would be overthrown by force majeure when there was found to be no space left to lock up half the population. Yes, a social revolution with both good and bad effects would be complicated. What the Anglosphere governments are doing is very different. They want to have all the information possible about us and for us to have less and less information about them. Obama and the other secrecy-and-police state governors of our world are working even more assiduously to put the public in the dark than they are to spy on us. And that is a very different thing.