[chmike]

I fear people are confusing things. Take the analogy of police patrols in streets. They may see all what you do and even control your identity and ask you questions. You may consider this as a frontal aggression to your privacy and right to move around without beeing spied. You may claim it's the same as the gestapo, or your preferred historical reference. It wouldn't be fully wrong.

But see that it has also been understood by your ancestors that it is a price to pay to ensure security of the people. Because while they look at what you do they also look at what bad people do and will detect them most of the time.

The same change is taking place at a country and hopefuly at a world scale by using the new tools available.

Now back to the police patrols. While this has a proven positive effect on ssecurity, this is also a risk because these armed forces walking among us may also be subverted and they may abuse people. This is a real danger and by society evolution and learning mechanisms and rules have been put in place to avoid this.

All I say is that police patrols are unavoidable and needed to ensure security. Our concern should be to focus on the mechanisms and rules put in place to ensure it doesn't go wrong, gets misused or abused.

So I think we agree that there is indeed a danger with this. We may disagree on what the danger is and what we should focus on. This is in par with democracy.

[betterunix]

Police patrols are not one thing. It is not just "officer friendly" with a nightstick. In New York City, there are paramilitary teams wandering around in subway stations -- one can only recognize them as police because of the word POLICE written on their body armor.

Things have gotten excessive:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/cops-military-gear/a...

[peterhost]

Yup. There has to be some sort of control in any system (even a few anarchists agree on that).

To further your/my/our point(s), you can read Bruce Schneier's latest "Crypto-Gram Newsletter" (https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1212.html). He rephrases the problem with a feudal/serf paradygm, which is quite appropriate imo.