The Cathedral does so love its clever little acronyms (e.g.: SWAT).

One common misconception nowadays is that internet surveillance works the same way telephone wiretaps used to work in the past, i.e. that someone has to go out of his way to set it up, and if nobody does, the information is by default not recorded anywhere.

In the digital era, however, quite the opposite is the case. Usually you have to go out of your way to delete information, not to collect it. If you just do things the easiest and cheapest way, logs and backups will accumulate indefinitely, and storage is so dirt-cheap that it’s usually not worth the hassle to reclaim it. So rather than having to set up surveillance actively, the government only needs to tell the internet and phone companies not to bother to destroy information, and to provide access to their logs and backups as required.

This is not true of all information, of course. Recording the entire content of all traffic is difficult and expensive. However, the “pen register” kinds of logs, i.e. who communicated with whom, who published or accessed which online material, who engaged in which transactions, etc., certainly have this property of being easier to keep than delete. Moreover, servers are fully backed up, so by cross-referencing their backups with the aforementioned logs, the system offers enormous surveillance capabilities by default. It is simply not realistic that governments wouldn’t obtain this wealth of information about their subjects, one way or another.

So, Handle is certainly right that Orwellian-scale surveillance by the government and large internet and telecom companies is inevitable in the digital era, and the best we can hope for are governments that just don’t care about what their subject say and write, except when engaged in genuine criminal activity. On the other hand, this is actually not that far from what we have now, especially in the U.S., and even in the rest of the Anglosphere. The real problem, for the most part, is the volunteer thought police. And while I can readily imagine a saner society where the latter would be much less frightful and stifling, I still find it hard to imagine a society that wouldn’t have at least some issues where anonymous (before the general public) speech would be the only outlet for truth and sanity. (For this reason, as well as many others, the prospect of a “transparent society” where you’d have no privacy even against ordinary persons fills me with a far worse dread than any plausible threat of government surveillance.)

(To wander even further off your point — Of all possible state suppressions of liberty, a blanket ban on public demonstrations is in my book the least problematic, and quite possibly a ‘good’ thing.)

I’d go even further and completely deny that public demonstrations are an exercise of liberty in any meaningful sense. Even the most peaceful and civilized public demonstration is an attempt at the big-megaphone tactic of public discourse, where truth doesn’t matter, and the winner is the side that gets to shout down the opposition.

“Open expression” — OK, but I’m not sure we should waste out energies defending obnoxious vociferous mobs. Maybe total freedom of expression, as long as it’s communicated in Latin? Or for a more contemporary set of global realities, classical Chinese?

Political winds may shift (we can only hope), but short of a new dark age technologies don’t disappear. We have crossed the Information Surveillance Rubicon and will not go back (and ought not to – we need it) so it’s back to fighting on the front of open expression.

(To wander even further off your point — Of all possible state suppressions of liberty, a blanket ban on public demonstrations is in my book the least problematic, and quite possibly a ‘good’ thing.)

2. Also, I think people are radically misunderstanding the nature of our problem, or phrased in different ways, focusing on the wrong things or buying into someone else’s frame in the way they structure “the debate”. The secondary problem is the inability to hide your communications from the government. The primary problem is the inability to openly express your honest sentiments, heretical to the Blue Orthodoxy, without totalitarian consequences, formal, informal, or otherwise.

Consider the recent case of Marine Le Pen. This is the problem. People want privacy and secrecy because of the primary problem. What good does it do to solve the secondary problem is all it means is that we have to go dark, remain in the closet, and lurk in the shadows. If we shout “Protect my closet! How dare you threaten my shadows!”, we are acquiescing and surrendering to a state of affairs which requires shadows – which implicitly concedes the position that the standing witch-trial court in which we live is perfectly justified and appropriate. Ask yourselves which problem you would prefer to solve if you could have only one. No privacy, but true freedom of speech, or true privacy, but no ability to openly, and with real-life attribution, say what you believe? I’ll take option one in a heartbeat. Et tu?

3. My impression is that the unavowability of the”unavowable compensator” is not so much a substantive issue (though it is for some), but a rhetorical phenomenon. Most of the managerial leftists who hysterically decry some controversial security tactic when out of power are completely nonchalant and sanguine (or even sadistically enthusiastic) about them when in power. The debate is always unwinnable when the commentariat – neither responsible nor accountable for any actual results – can always claim that X is a sinister betrayal of our values that only evil people could support.