First I'll say that surveillance is a consensus among people in power no matter how you slice it. It is, depending on your perspective 1) about governments expanding government power, something the powerful in government always want or 2) about defending against terrorism, something everyone wants.
I'll give you my perspective on your question as someone fairly left of center, so take it with a grain of salt. Or take it as God's truth, whatever you fancy.
People, inevitably inexorably being strangled to death by the neoliberal free market capitalist economic system which has controlled nearly every western government since the 80s, are struggling and striking out for anything that will save them. People often turn to extremism and fascism of all stripes in situations like that. They become more extreme, because the status quo is a slow and painful death so anything that seems like it will bring change is good. When you are drowning you don't worry too much about the kind of boat that's offering to pull you up, you just climb onto it. Even if that boat is a slave ship.
Leftists have seen some success recently when they drop the ridiculous affectation of 'reasonable centrism and compromise' (centrism is only ever reasonable to people for whom the status quo is working, almost by definition), stop focusing on race/gender to the exclusion of class, and present real, radical, explicit and understandable changes to improve the lives of voters: Corbyn, Sanders, even Melenchon have all had encouraging and very high levels of success relative to expectations and the recent past, though they are mentioned in the order of their absolute success (Corbyn, topping the list, won a huge number of seats, the largest increase in labor vote share since 1945, caused a hung parliament which is pushing the Tories to make an uneasy alliance with an extremist group).
But these movements are still beginning and have a lot of work to do; they diametrically oppose the entrenched order explicitly (for the ultrawealthy, a Muslim ban is gauche and unbecoming of their senses of civility and properness; nationalizing private industry to take it from robber barons or providing healthcare for the poor is a very assault on their power/way of life), so they receive no support from above.
There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and dislike mass surveillance.
Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.
What big liberal democracy isn't becoming a surveillance state? The U.K. seems 10-15 years ahead of us on that front, and people seem to like it just fine over there. Maybe the answer is just that pervasive surveillance isn't something that upsets people?
The most scary thing for me is that both political left and political right is nowadays for increasing surveillance - and there is no one in opposition.
Except probably for Pirate parties, which are mostly irrelevant.
The Conservative party are in government. Their programme is designed to extract wealth and political agency from the general populace, and suck it up into the control of their own class of people (a mixture of landed gentry, financiers etc).
Their vehicles for doing this are fear and distraction, propagated by the media outlets they and their friends own.
In this context, zeal for surveillance makes perfect sense. It plays well with people convinced by the Daily Mail that some boogyman (immigrants, paedophiles, whatever) is coming to get them and their children. And it's also useful for keeping tabs on protesters and strikers, who try to draw attention to their tactics and goals.
There are many who not only remain unconcerned but often seek to diminish or dismiss concern as hyperbole or exaggerated, often by pointing to the current status quo.
No one is interested in you the individual, but they are certainly interested in building the capability to track all individuals and preempt anything that threatens any entrenched status quo.
We are not currently a police state but we are certainly building the capability and the cultural language to justify it. The moral high ground and the entire framework of values that powered it have shown to be near meaningless by the alarming ease with which they have been discarded in favour of the language of security and paranoia. Everyone is safe in a cage. It will be naive to believe in the context of how modern states operate that a cluster of extreme right wing medievalists in the ME are bringing on this state of affairs, the bulk and most powerful of whom are paradoxically our best friends in the region.
Surveillance states are not a on/off thing, you don't suddenly wake one day to a surveillance state. These capabilities take time to build, but once the infrastructure is in place it will inevitably get used.
In this case we can see all the pieces being put in place methodically with language that makes George Orwell look astonishingly prescient. And its the self absorption of this generation who have inherited and enjoyed a relatively 'free' and equal state with 'hope for improvement' but are going to willfully pass on something more ominous.
There's also the fact that liberals - the ideological faction most likely to protest these programs - have been reluctant to criticise a president from their own party.
That's not true, but not surprising coming from the bbc. The BBC needs to differentiate between leftists and liberals. Leftist regimes throughout history have always been for surveillance.
Surveillance isn't just tapping lines. It's also forced government mandates of the individual that are effective in knowing what you're up to.
If you think that it takes an elite cadre of civil libertarians to protect the country from 1984-style dystopia, then surveillance is indeed a scary thing. But surveillance isn't going to do anything against broad-based public opposition. If you think the masses of ordinary people are capable of preventing a 1984-style dystopia through majoritarian mechanisms, then surveillance is a lot less scary.
Some of these groups probably warranted to be kept an eye on. The question is more the extent of the monitoring.
Like in Norway, where extensive illegal spying on the left was "revealed" in the mid 90's ("revealed" because many subjects of the spying had reported it for decades and been laughed at), a large part of the disturbing aspect of the scope is how little they found given the resources they kept putting into it for decades on end, and how clearly a lot of the resources were put in more to intimidate than to carry out surveillance. I used to know a guy that had been followed to and from work for years - he was a trade union rep and communist party member, and the only reason he had for why they might have done that was that his route went past the Soviet embassy; of course if he'd actually been a spy, he wouldn't have been dumb enough to meet them there, and presumably the police knew that as well as he did; his impression was that they wanted him to know.
I don't know if this affected their work in other areas in the UK (but note that they monitored a huge number of left wing groups and 3 far right groups), but in Norway their obsession with the left led to them largely overlooking the rise of the neo-nazis in the 70's and 80's despite increasing levels of violence including several terrorist attacks (fire bombs thrown at May 1st parades and the like). Instead of taking them seriously, police took advantage of a firebomb thrown into the book store of a tiny maoist group to illegally secure copies of their membership register for example, and went on to suggest they'd thrown the fire bomb themselves. It was first towards the end of the 80's that escalating neo-nazi violence forced the policy to refocus their attention on the far right.
To me that is a bigger concern than their monitoring of the left - any such group with something to hide would expect to be infiltrated anyway; most of them had nothing to hide. But when their myopic focus on one set of group makes them ignore other threats, then it because a risk to society.
Absolutely spot on! I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments, be it in the UK, Australia, France, the U.S., everywhere the government is making a grab for more and wider surveillance powers, the majority of the population seem totally oblivious. There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?
Well western governments are experts in keeping their population docile and politically disinterested. So I'm not surprised a growing percentage of their population is fine with being monitored and spied on. The majority of the population might not really need protection from the state, but the few that do, dissidents, political activists definitely do.
By establishing a culture, where people are happy to share their data with the government anyone who isn't will automatically be a suspect. For example people who use TOR are put on a list. I don't know what live you lived, but some of my friends were under police surveillance (some police officer lived as a student for several years before his cover was blown by an acquaintance) because the government thought they had to keep taps on far left student organisations. Considering how much effort they went through to do that, I'm sure they monitor much more benign activity electronically.
Your intriguing missive would be better served by not slandering your opponents. By which I mean, why say "fake" left without explaining what the left position is and what is fake about it. It's as if you expect us to be privy to some evolving thought process or conversation and that expectation is a little troublesome for me.
But apart from that. Of course you come across as a little, (um, how do I put this delicately?) ... half-baked. Sorry! It's true. Like that old joke, you read 1984 as an instruction manual, not a warning? But seriously, surveillance is freedom. Like I say, intriguing. I've often wondered about the behaviour modifying properties of believing in an omniscient creator. I think you're pointing to something similar, except humans themselves are the ever-watching eyes and ears. I actually think you could be correct to some extent, the knowledge that someone is observing you does affect ones behaviour -- cf: chilling effect.
Taking you at face value: counter-argument. 1) Adults are not dependent on the government in the way you describe. In modern society we are all dependent on each other. 2) Who watches the watchers becomes a very real problem and not one that has been solved. 3) We know empirically that total surveillance states don't last very long. Have we got it right this time? Let's see. If we have then human society has been changed utterly and political theorists will have a lot of work to do. 4) Lots of people (from the left and right) don't want to live in that kind of society, no matter the benefits. 5) I'm not convinced the good you put forward outweighs the obvious dangers, you'd have to present a much more coherent argument than the one you are presenting.
I know you'll be shot down here but I find the intellectual challenge of responding to your position rewarding, so thanks for that.
edit: thought of a sixth. 6) maybe some behaviours you want (like being able to speak out against injustices and corruption and so on) will be suppressed as well as the "bad" beahviours you want rid of.
I think that largely depends on the State and Government.
Growing up in England, I'd largely say that people have a sense of freedom [how true that is vs. media tainted perspectives is anyone's guess], that despite (allegedly) one of the most extensive surveillance networks in the world, people there don't generally sense a fear of being watched or oppressed... and it's not that people don't know they're on camera somewhere, we're all well aware that someone could be [albeit after the fact] watching our every [public] move, it's just that they don't tend to give it a second thought or care.
I can't say this doesn't affect anyone's behaviour, but I don't feel that my feelings are atypical and it doesn't affect mine.
It's only once there's a tipping point in the volume of people feeling of oppressed that revolutions arise and States destabilized...
...or bad actors use dirty politics to throw countries into financial turmoil, inject a sense of panic into the population and overthrow regimes that are not friendly to their agenda... or back the wrong frenemies and leave a pile of rubble and a want for revenge where there was once [reasonable] stability; even if that stability didn't look like they thought it should or didn't align with their own economic/political agenda.
On another note, pencil & paper never got a virus that tunneled its way around the internet taking over thousands of computers to be used as a bot network for cyber attacks on industry... and when the power went out, I could still use my credit card to pay for things. Most stores appear to have forgotten that ability.
Left wing and right wing groups I might add. The police and/or intelligence agencies spy on everything and everyone considered to be a threat to the State. Including possibly you, right now, reading this comment using those mass surveillance laws used to combat "terrorism".
And why they don't take any action against these groups you might ask? That's because some of these are _very_ useful in regard to controlling the populus (e.g. threat of violence leading to self-censorship) and enabling the removal of more and more liberties.
You might think that people managed to learn how ruthless, vile cretins like Hitler and Stalin actually got to their positions of power, and how they expanded them. But nope. We are just waiting for, and in some cases actively enabling, all that shit to happen all over again.
It is almost like human civilization keeps going round and round in a perpetuation of hate, abuse, vileness and misery. And it's so sad given the fact that we actually _have_ EVERYTHING we need to destroy this cycle once and for all.
The more I think the more I realise that some of those people's hearts are in the right place. And the amusing part is that I am starting to realise that a lot of the surveillance tech was developed under either left and right governments and politicians. Thus we can find common ground. The enemy of enemy and all that :-)
I'll give you my perspective on your question as someone fairly left of center, so take it with a grain of salt. Or take it as God's truth, whatever you fancy.
People, inevitably inexorably being strangled to death by the neoliberal free market capitalist economic system which has controlled nearly every western government since the 80s, are struggling and striking out for anything that will save them. People often turn to extremism and fascism of all stripes in situations like that. They become more extreme, because the status quo is a slow and painful death so anything that seems like it will bring change is good. When you are drowning you don't worry too much about the kind of boat that's offering to pull you up, you just climb onto it. Even if that boat is a slave ship.
Leftists have seen some success recently when they drop the ridiculous affectation of 'reasonable centrism and compromise' (centrism is only ever reasonable to people for whom the status quo is working, almost by definition), stop focusing on race/gender to the exclusion of class, and present real, radical, explicit and understandable changes to improve the lives of voters: Corbyn, Sanders, even Melenchon have all had encouraging and very high levels of success relative to expectations and the recent past, though they are mentioned in the order of their absolute success (Corbyn, topping the list, won a huge number of seats, the largest increase in labor vote share since 1945, caused a hung parliament which is pushing the Tories to make an uneasy alliance with an extremist group).
But these movements are still beginning and have a lot of work to do; they diametrically oppose the entrenched order explicitly (for the ultrawealthy, a Muslim ban is gauche and unbecoming of their senses of civility and properness; nationalizing private industry to take it from robber barons or providing healthcare for the poor is a very assault on their power/way of life), so they receive no support from above.
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