"Living in a country where political opponents are murdered, not just spied upon. Or else they are prosecuted for crimes they couldn't have possibly committed."
Your unstated presumption is that this doesn't happen here, and I think that's a presumption that up for debate. Not only that, but the surveillance engine is generally the precursor to any such more overt totalitarianism (as warned of by Thomas Drake, speaking of prosecuted for crimes not actually committed by the way).
… which might be the least of your concerns under a fascist regime.
I mean that it doesn’t take an authoritarian regime change for surveillance capabilities to become scary.
It could be your neighbor democracy tapping into your national systems, the national company entrusted with public information to misuse them for profit…
An unabashedly totalitarian regime would spy on all its subjects, all the time, through every available channel. It would keep the details of its spying as secret as it can, while letting everyone know they're being watched. It looks like we have most of this, minus 'unabashedly': they claim they drop particular cases where they learn the people they're spying on are citizens within the borders who don't fit a long list of exceptions (crypto, etc.); and they're trying to hide the extent of spying. (On the other hand I don't consider secret courts to weigh much against the label 'totalitarian': the Soviets had that kind of thing, too.)
It could be unparalleled in either nature or extent. In nature, automated data mining is pretty new; in extent, the previous paradigm case, the Stasi, falls laughably short in some ways, while still far ahead in others (informers).
I think the quote isn't unreasonable, though it's loose.
I'm not sure what the surveillance has to do. I was responding to a comment saying that while the CCP cracks down on dissidents it does so mostly based on perceived "blast radius" (i.e. reach). I'm saying this selective enforcement is actually worse than if they just blindly enforced a specific ban.
If anything "spy on your neighbor" plays into what I said: you not only need to worry about getting on the bad side of the authority (i.e. those able to enforce the law against you) but of literally anyone else who might have it out for you. The legal basis for arresting people is just legalistic window dressing to create a pretense of law and justice.
This is, by the way, the biggest practical distinction between the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: in peak Nazi Germany the police would just drag you off the street and throw you in a hole or shoot you for treason, in the Soviet Union the police would disappear you into a gulag but only after giving you an unwinnable mock trial where you would be put on record to confess (after torture if necessary or desired) to your treasonous counter-revolutionary beliefs. Because one followed purely from "might makes right" and the other tried to maintain a pretense of ideological principles and justice. Not that this mattered much to those on the receiving end - you'd still end up dead or imprisoned.
I don't mean to say that surveillance stopped necessarily but I thought that the thought of having a police state such as it was in East Germany or in other Eastern European countries would have vaccinated the world against those tyrannical tendencies.
It's little bit what we have now with respect to nuclear weapons, where we have used them twice and decided to not do it again (so far).
I just cannot fathom that someone is genuinely ok with having their worst secrets and their deepest fear out there in the open being sorted and analyzed by some black box algorithm who may or may not start an investigation against them because they said the wrong thing or shared the wrong image.
Any good totalitarian state implements the most ubiquitous surveillance they can. When the framework for that is already present, it becomes much easier to birth something like that. It's very easy to avoid creating a fertile breeding ground for totalitarian governance, and a factor of that's not having ubiquitous surveillance.
It's very common around the world in general. That doesn't make it right, of course - it just means that the surveillance state is more widespread than commonly assumed.
It was about totalitarianism. An inescapable State.
Public surveillance everywhere is a precursor to that.
The surveillance within your home is very much already a reality.
Now we have people welcoming this creeping totalitarianism with concerns of safety. Trading justice for individual crimes at the ever-growing risk of totalitarianism.
It could be true, because that's just the nature of an autocratic state. Former Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany also suspected their citizens conspiring against them. Which is why they need to tap phones and surveil internet.
Apologies for assuming you were talking of the US. You gotta understand that as an American, I'm used to having many of my compatriots worried about a dictatorship to come while blind to the mechanisms of democratic power. Which naturally includes a complete disregard for non-citizen.
That said, the US is still one example of how surveillance doesn't have to lead overt despotism. Really, I think surveillance is essentially the reflex of every modern today, even those which now have a better reputation than the States - Canada or Northern Europe say.
I agree with you that this extent of surveillance is a characteristic element of totalitarian regimes. But the things that totalitarian regimes do with the data they collect is different from what happens in the US right now (as far as I can tell).
All totalitarian regimes used broad surveillance, but not all countries that have overly broad surveillance programs are totalitarian. What's missing is the desire for total control of many different aspects of life and political activity.
However, I think that there is a great danger that "total information awareness" leads to an ever greater desire for total control. That desire may even come from the people and have superficial democratic legitimacy. If everyone knows that the government knows everything, the people will demand control over many things that other people do.
There's plenty of ocurrences of unlawful high tech surveillance and political persecution all over the third world too. More often than not even more problematic situations.
It's always that way--the surveillance state grows up around you, all the while ensuring you that no harm will come to you as long as you don't resist or subvert. But here's the thing about that: At some point, if we end up in a tyranny, your acquiescence and silence won't protect you. You will be targeted, perhaps randomly, perhaps by a neighbor with some petty vendetta. The point is, you have no idea what devils you are playing with. The Germans happily murdered the elderly, the retarded, homosexuals, gypsies, on and on. None of those people were actively fighting the regime, they were just simply useless eaters who got in the way.
The same story has played out dozens of times in history. Stalin, Pol Pot--tyrants kill for irrational reasons.
Your unstated presumption is that this doesn't happen here, and I think that's a presumption that up for debate. Not only that, but the surveillance engine is generally the precursor to any such more overt totalitarianism (as warned of by Thomas Drake, speaking of prosecuted for crimes not actually committed by the way).
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