[mothballed]

What's hilarious is that in supposed dystopic corrupt hellholes I've lived or spent time in (Syria during the civil war, Iraq, Philippines, etc) all of this is unimaginable. Westerners view freedom as having a piece of paper that says they are free plus not having to bother fighting off ISIS or the gangsters because the even bigger gangster in a clean uniform and nice jackboot will take care of it. Much of the rest of the world views freedom as the government being weak enough that it's actually possible for rebel groups to emerge, which you might then have to fight off, but at least that is easier to fight off than a central government that consumes 25+% of the GDP and projects their air power to every end of the earth and meanwhile if you exercise a bit of freedom it goes under the radar particularly if there is no victim to complain about it.

Of course, there are cases like North Korea where you get the worst of both worlds (strong central government + not even a useful piece of paper limiting it).

[bee_rider]

I often wonder what rights were not written down because the people writing the Constitution in the US just didn’t think of a state with enough capacity to infringe on them. I think a lot of surveillance stuff is like that: they concerned themselves with improper searches because that was how your privacy was violated. They didn’t even consider a system that could just automatically log all public actions and what could easily be inferred from those logs.

That said, I don’t think I would like to live in a region governed by gangs or rebel groups, even if they probably don’t have the capacity to annoy everybody, the low odds of a catastrophic interaction with enforcement seems bad.