Surveillance, tracking, etc., has been a fact of life for decades, if not scores of years. It's not confined to governments, and it's not ever going away. The very volume of information generated by this activity is its very Achilles Heel. It looks for people behaving outside their own activity patterns, and is probably unable to cope with sudden mass deviations from those behavior patterns. I don't now, and I don't worry about what I don't know. I like the idea that more and more resources are being drawn into what I consider to be a futile exercise; i.e when they have the info, what do they do with it next? I don't think there's a consensus on that in government, and such a consensus would be the thing that troubles me most, because as a political construct, impasse and group thinking are the likeliest outcomes. Then there's the political factor, which is constantly changing. That's not good for productive outcomes.
Communism failed because no matter how much power it wielded internally, I could not master both the internal and external tasks required to impose its success on an unwilling world; and the idea was never a good one in the first place. Governments which consider totalitarianism as a viable plan can never get their acts together sufficiently to achieve their goals, whatever they may be. They all want to be the top dog, they can't all be, and that's a recipe for failure. All they do manage to achieve is pain and death, and eventually it's their own. Of all the wasted effort in this world, the attempts by disparate governments to achieve both external and internal supremacy are the most wasteful, the ones where the bulk of deadlocked, wasted energy most abounds. When all that energy is totaled up and the counteracting forces are cancelled out, actually productive energy probably amounts to less than ten percent overall, and probably less than five.
Standing up and being the nail simply draws attention from the otherwise frustrated operatives of such organizations. I think it's far better simply get on with one's life, because if enough do, there becomes less and less reason to justify those operatives' existence. When doing what's productive becomes a big enough portion of everything that's going on, surveillance becomes redundant, and harder and harder to justify. I figure just doing what one needs to do to survive day to day, waiting it out, provides the most success and satisfaction. Going against that is simply playing into some fairly effective hands, and adds to the meager justification for all that Secret Squirrel fun and games aimed at domestic dissent. I prefer to wait them out and let them reap the rewards of boredom and redundancy. They'll never catch me up in their nets because, simply, there's nothing to catch me doing that justifies their attention; in may ways, a simple life is the best one, and this is only one of the reasons why such is so.
Maybe the reason why the activities depicted in the original post get by for so long is because so much of the needed attention is wasted in vetting the innocent. I don't believe that the folks in charge are ever gong to learn that lesson; more's the pity. Everyman is not the suspect, but one size fits all, and logic be damned.
Greg
