From The Black Box Society, by Frank Pasquale, pg 52:
An unaccountable surveillance state may pose a greater threat to liberty than any particular terror threat. It is not a spectacular dangers, but rather an erosion of a range of freedoms. Most insidiously, the “watchers” have the power to classify those who dare to point this out as “enemies of the state,” themselves in need of scrutiny. That, to me, is the core harm of surveillance: that it freezes into place an inefficient (or worse) politico-economic regime by cowing its critics into silence. Mass surveillance may be doing less to deter destructive acts than it is slowly narrowing of the range of tolerable thought and behaviour.
Where might this lead? What I think of as ‘techno-fascism’ is a speculative answer. How bad could this get if left unchecked? What would life within such a social order look and feel like? Could we imagine a frozen social formation, one able to perpetually recreate itself without change or challenge?
Mark Carrigan 