Privacy

These days, in all seriousness, I'm more afraid of the corpo surveillance. I was there for the PATRIOT ACT, and that "insane" NSA datacenter that everyone freaked out about. Now we have corpos building scale way beyond the NSA.

The government spying also has oddly not had an obvious impact on society in the last 20 years. I think the corpo one will reshape worldwide culture. But yeah, governments will of course take advantage of that cheap surveillance data as well.

Right now anyway, I'm less afraid of imprisonment or violent retaliation than I am of being manipulated or silenced by less forceful means. You can't imprison a majority of the population, but you can control them through ideas and the ability to communicate.

Private surveillance companies like flock and palantir exist to allow the government to spy on everyone but say, "we are not violating people's rights, we just access info from private companies. They are one in the same.

This post reads like astroturfing for big surveillance.

Uuuh, ever heard of Edward Snowden? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

And this was 13 years ago.

Knowledge is power. The govt continues to grow more knowledgeable around the world. People don't seem to care. So yeah, we're boned.

For the most part the terror is theoretical. As others have mentioned there is no practical difference between surveillance companies and three letter agencies, there is a revolving door of employees and information between the two and almost no sunlight between them. Having said that the dystopian fears of misuse are well founded, but as of yet mass surveillance has only really been publicly misused on the personal level. Cops and agents using flock to stalk people, local law enforcement using them in oppressive ways, but we haven't yet seen it applied at scale.

Realistically, those tools allow for heavy handed control, but Americans are still Americans, they need to be coaxed into being okay with large groups being rounded up for exercising their right to free speech. That's really where the true danger lies. The Algorithm heavily shapes the opinions of the masses and it is currently and actively being used to do just that. I could write extensively about the how's, why's, and who's but that's way beyond the scope of your question. Suffice it to say the feed controls the shape of the debate so that there are only two sides when in reality there are dozens for each issue. Just ask yourself when was the last time you saw a post suggesting cutting military spending or getting rid of gendered sports in favor of weight and height based groupings?

Pick up a history book. The action of secret polices are well-documented. The Stasi, KGB, and so on.

And it's not "one day". Federal agents have visited at least one person's home already because of political posts online: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/26/nx-s1-5871369/new-york-ice-instagram-immigration-dhs-paigelynne-gonyea