[dkersten]

Government monitoring "for your own good" is pretty scary. We already have situations where people are attacked by the government or its agents because they did something that only harms themselves. For example [1]. Mass surveillance, if left unchecked, will eventually expand for whatever purposes the government wishes. Power is easy to incrementally grow (or in the case of the NSA, they simply ignore the laws) and very difficult to shrink again. We shouldn't think that this wouldn't be used against us sometime in the future and who can truly say that they never did anything harmless-but-illegal (take drugs? gambling? copyright infringement?) and as [1] shows, people have died for these "crimes".

[1] https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=...

[logfromblammo]

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis

That's one of my favorite author quotes. The greatest evil in this world is done by those who can see their own work and tell themselves that it is good.

[dkersten]

That is a fantastic quote. Thanks for posting it.