We all want to live in an perfect society, where there is no crime, and everyone are happy.
Recently there are trends all over the world especially in the west towards increased surveillance of its citizens in the name of security and law enforcement. One step closer to perfect society, where there is no crime or terrorism. Happiness is some other department apparently or your own problem, anyway:
The strongest argument agains increased surveillance is often one of the privacy, which is usually counteracted with "if you don't have anything to hide, you should not worry", to which there is an usual counterargument of "the information can get into wrong hands".
Even though those arguments agains increased surveillance are good they don't touch the fundamental problem of it all and there are therefore no real observable change in the policies, increased surveillance of citizens is on the march in many countries, to prevent terrorism, to prevent piracy, to prevent crime, or anything which needs preventing.
But the problem is not about wrong people getting hold of the information, because it is unintended, and everyone arguing for the increased surveillance will claim that it will never happen, the problem is in "right people", striving for the perfect society, having this information.
Because who are the "right people"? It is predominantly the government. Government is also the entity shaping the future of the society and exercising power over people. Government of the people, for the people, went out the window when it made it's first decision or law not supported by the majority of the people.
There are certain thing we don't want anyone to know, certain thing we have already forgotten or would rather forget. All of us has some things we don't want anyone to know about, something we are not proud of, or mistakes we have made, it doesn't necessary have to be something illegal.
Hence as the surveillance spreads such things get increasingly difficult to conveniently forget, more and more data about you are recorded in different ways, depending on the country you live in. As storage get cheaper more information can be stored for longer time.
And as the trend continues you loose the control over the information, your ability to choose what you don't want to disclose diminishes with increased surveillance, and instead becomes a matter of necessity for looking it up, i.e. the government will have a way to just look up people of interest and get the information about them from all the different sources which are available to them.
The sources might vary from county to country and you can probably dig up somewhere the ways your government monitors you citizens.
Having enough information stored about you it is always possible to make a case against you. It is just a matter of having enough of different ways to gather accurate information. At this point there might not be any country capable of doing this.
But as technology evolves it becomes possible to store information such as medical record, financial record e.t.c. for long period of time and get accuracy by for example face recognition on CCTV cameras, movement tracking, vehicle tracking by registering number plates on traffic cameras, or simply gps tracking, phone record of people you have been in contact with, record of people you emailed, keywords used in search engine, websites visited, e.t.c.
Even if you haven't driven too fast at any time in your life, smoked a joint, done some undeclared work e.t.c. is there nothing in your life that would be possible to classify as antisocial behavior?
If a girl/boy/woman/man knew everything about you on the first date, would you get a second?
If employer knew everything about you, would you get the job you have?
If the government knew everything about you, would you be viewed as a good citizen today?
Have you lived a perfect life? No? Then oppose "perfect society" when government promises it. Because in such society there is no room for you.
