via wildgifthorses

FWIW I think that of all the reasons mass surveillance is bad, misuse and corruption are really only incidental and don't get to the heart of the problem. The problem is that the law as written encodes a very specific vision of the good and it's only through spotty enforcement that we have a meaningfully free society. In a world with perfect, universal surveillance, no one in the US would ever be able to drop acid, arrange a physical fight, pirate movies, sext or watch porn in high school, drink in their first two years of college, visit a graveyard at night, access HRT without a doctor's note, etc. Maybe you think some of these things are good and some of them are bad, but notably, moral progress has happened in the past in our society (on marijuana, homosexuality, etc.) because there were long-standing communities of practice engaged in illegal activities who could vouch for that way of life, which is a process that becomes outright impossible with universal, effective surveillance and interpretation of communications.

This isn't really a democratic vs. anti-democratic issue because even a widespread social consensus can be wrong in such a way that experiments with violating it existing at all even if highly marginalized is ultimately to the good.

I guess if I was a moral realist and thought that any rational being will inevitably converge to my preferences I wouldn't be worried, but I'm not, which is why I believe in liberalism, which is to say the existence of a free society, and even if it maintains the forms of "liberalism" a society with effective universal surveillance is not meaningfully free, and the closer it gets to that state the less free it becomes.