While I hope the ACLU sues and wins --
-- on constitutional grounds, I suspect expanded authoritarian state surveillance is an unavoidable future in most currently democratic nations. I expect that, in the 30 or so years I will probably continue breathing, US citizens will be required to carry identification papers and produce them on demand... or that US citizens will be required to have state-authorized chips implanted for ID purposes. (I'm betting on the chips, actually.)
As we breed toward 10 billion humans while the climate warms, farmland erodes and water gets scarce, then war and mass migration are the future. "Destination states" in North America and Europe will respond with increasingly draconian authoritarianism. Well, duh, they already are doing so.
So much for that.
I believe it was Plato who argued that democracy is unstable because as soon as a population elects a leader not because he is logically the best candidate but because he has swayed them through lies and emotion, then the democracy will become a dictatorship. In the USA, the authors of the Constitution worried about that thing quite a bit -- that a demagogue would rise to power -- and the famous checks and balances between the three branches of government were part of their answer. However, in the last 50 years (longer, actually) the legislative branch has surrendered so much power to the executive that it cannot or will not challenge the President, and the legislative branch has become so politicized as to destroy the impartiality of its rulings.
Kurt Vonnegut: "So it goes."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
