[myopicgoat]

This is a tricky line of thinking. Once surveillance is there you can always hide behind the “now we’re safer”, the issue is that you can always survey more and always claim that going back would be less safe and so on and so forth. A good example for this is airport security. As far as I’m aware it’s quite unclear how effective all the security apparatus is yet it piled up over the years since 9/11, full body scans are now the norm etc. The question left to ask is: when is it too much? How much intrusion are we ready to bear for how much marginal safety gains?

[macintux]

It ultimately doesn’t matter much what we’re willing to bear. Those in power do not easily surrender tools that can keep them there.