I think dictators have learned a lot and technology has the possibility to be a real game changer. A few years ago I watched The Red Chapel which is a documentary on which the director and two comedians visit North Korea under the pretence of performing a comedy show there. At one point it got clear that people there even have to keep their basic emotions secret. How do you overthrow the government if it had become that controlling and good at monitoring? I'm afraid it might not be possible.

Even more terrifying is the thought that if my above fear that this now might be a one-way road is true, is eventually every country going to become a oppressive dictatorship? On top of that we've seen the last year or so that we now have propaganda warfare on social media. Having free speech and little internal propaganda is clearly a weakness...

Edit: formatting

I don’t think we have seen anything like this in history. In past it was different, because your possibilities for collecting and processing information were much more limited. Also the security apparatus had to employ huge number of people, making it harder to control and less reliable.

Agree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities, but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied equipment that made it possible for WW2 Germany (did I dodge Godwin's law?) to collate evidence of ethnicity at a scale not known before, with disastrous results [1].

I think that to some, surveillance often looks like a way to get the efficiency of distributed decision making while keeping central control (which has definitely been the philosophy behind China's economic experiments of the past 30y). But historically, it has arced towards enforcing centralized organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the tech involved - and that pattern has proven both bad for a population and self-defeating for regimes.

[1] http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html

Definitely. Remember when the Snowden documents disclosed the Utah facilities keeping ~5 years of every communication record of every person, processed into the most actionable metadata, and the related capabilities to search and correlate the content, interrelationships, and signals implicit across those communications?

This is something that could only be targeted decades ago. Now its cost-admissible to run at scale - and to do so adaptively to improve the methods.

There was a time when your comments here would be discussed and generally agreed with instead of blindly downvoted and removed.

Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time HN had a good discussion about US censorship and surveillance.

Weird.

Well as somebody who is very anti US-monitoring, let me help you understand:

Your comments are so unproductive (i.e. emotional/irrelevant/us-vs-them) that they actually undermine the cause you say you're concerned about. You give the rest of us a bad name.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? They only lower the quality of this site even further.

There was no legitimate reason to remove this man's comments. He provided a legitimate perspective, and wasn't flaming anyone or being rude.

Defending him was your job, not mine.

Defending someone is no reason to break the site guidelines. If you keep doing that, we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19187633 was particularly unacceptable.

What's the existential reason for organizing complex societies? -_-a

Defense against other complex societies.

Quality of life

I'm not sure the tons of 18th-19th century working poor brought in from their rural towns and farms to industrial London (by laws that purposefully made their old trades deprecated), working and living under hellish dickensian conditions would agree...

What? Other cultures also want to protect their identity? I thought only mine was allowed to.

I'd genuinely love to hear your analysis of the American surveillance state.