Michael Rozeff makes an impassioned plea at LRC:

“Whether it’s the Gallup or Pew poll of Americans on surveillance, there is not a rock hard super-majority that is against the surveillance state. Americans haven’t experienced the possible downsides of a state that can go back years to hear and read their most private communications.

[Lila: Actually, that is what happened to me, and, as best as I can understand it, it wasn’t the surveillance state as such, but some private individual who employed contacts at the state to access my private information, without any authorization. I was able to confirm my suspicions after talking to counter-surveillance specialists who had formerly worked in the government who said that private and corporate accessing of individual information, illegally, was a huge problem.]

They are blissfully unaware of the workings of police states and the role played by the state’s possession of files on everyone. They do not understand that when the blackness of the human heart is combined with the control of such vast information sources, the most horrible oppression results. They cannot imagine the horrible workings of suspicion, greed, envy, snitches, and hatred, or the workings of the reformers, the religious, the utopians, the social planners, the intellectuals, the power-hungry and the idealists when they gain such power. They do not understand that when the machinery of oppression and dominance is rolled into place, and this includes access to private information on anyone and everyone, that all it takes is a pull of the switch — a crisis, real or manufactured — for Congress to pass a law that turns on the police state. They do not understand that once it is turned on, the nation must go through the wringer to get it turned off, and that could take generations.

Dismantle the machinery of oppression now! It is much easier to do it now, than later, and it is already very hard to do this even now.”