[photochemsyn]

This article seems to be a response to this 'free Orwellian TV monitor' offer:

https://www.wired.com/story/telly-tv-free-privacy/

I think the real wet dream of the security state is to have a software agent for every human on the planet. Something rather like this was at the core of DARPA's "Total Information Awareness" program of about two decades ago (later absorbed by the NSA and private contractors IIRC). Today's LLMs help make the concept clear - if you could collect enough data about a person you could create a software construct that could predict how that person would respond to different stimuli - an advertisement, a news story, etc. It would be the greatest tool for mass control every invented in the history of humanity - and those in control would use it to create the most dystopian authoritarian state imaginable - and yet those who lived under that state would probably think they were 'free people'.

The idea was nicely laid out in the 1995 movie, "Twelve Monkeys":

> "Jeffrey Goines : When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of mental health. I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly. Then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I'm ever gonna do before I know it myself. How's that?"

It's the FBI keeping files on citizens, but on steroids. Those claiming 'this is fine' generally don't like to talk about who would get access to the database of agents, and who wouldn't.