Why the Surveillance State is Dangerous

Senator Rand Paul shared a link to an article from the Foundation for Economic Education (June 17, 2018) Why the Surveillance State is Dangerous.

Who ever thought that Americans would be, like mere Europeans, searched at “checkpoints,” that many searches would be rechristened “inspections,” or that border agents would have the right to search smartphones or other devices without a warrant at the rate of 30,000 times a year (including searches of citizens’ devices)? The NSA has been spying on millions of Americans. Until about 2010, according to Wall Street Journal data, the FBI had more DNA records than the Chinese government (which started later in the competition), although the collection is proceeding so fast in China that America doesn’t “win” the race anymore; per capita, the two countries are now about equal.

The problem of the Surveillance State is not so much what it knows as what it can do with what it knows. The Surveillance State is dangerous not so much because it violates some standard of privacy, but because surveillance fuels control.

What the state, with its vast coercive powers, can do with information gathering suggests that a serious problem only exists when the state does it, or when it can seize information from private parties’ databases.

The problem here is that there may very well be some government employee sitting in a basement office somewhere keeping secret, hidden, and illegal, files about you... and you would never know it.

To emphasize my point, “law-abiding people” must fear state surveillance because it makes it more likely that they will become non-law-abiding without any change in their behavior. They will be caught for violating laws that they even did not know existed. Moreover—and this is my main argument—the “law abiding” will be ensnared by new laws adopted because state rulers know that enforcement costs are not as prohibitive as they used to be. The level of surveillance will multiply the number of new laws imposed on the formerly law-abiding.