Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?

Even without technological advances, the US public school system has been able to teach false history (and other subjects including science) for decades. Sure it can be checked and a minority of students may be angry for being lied to but this has yet to stop the system. It's true that information is hardly it's primary purpose, that being babysitting, but the perception that school is for learning lends it much credibility.

The other major problem is that we are now forced to choose between privacy and innovation. Want to use any cloud based service or any service that operates on remote data? You give up any right to privacy regardless of any corporate policy. Want to be secure and private? Put up with slow tor, no remote services, and no cell phone. If enough people chose the latter, it might make a dent in companies' bottom line to possibly get them to use their clout to influence policy towards privacy. It's unlikely that will happen, and even if it does, until corporate data can be protected from surveillance without a warrant, even that is moot.

> We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun.

That's kind of the point though. After the Cold War we gave the military every capability needed to oppress us 1000x over without too much fretting about police states, trusting that the government would not force us to live at the point of a gun. We didn't simply forbid the military from having missiles, which is the proposed equivalent here.

> The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to.

Sure they were, ever since Smith v. Maryland, and for all the years before Katz v. United States. Any prohibitions on what government could look at regarding business records or on the wire were imposed by Congress, not by the Constitution.

Avoiding it is the easy part.

The hard part will be maintaining the Open Internet in the face of what Snowden did. He started to force policymakers to realize that a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network defense needs, normal law enforcement (not to mention the spy agencies that most countries want to run), and even cultural/jurisdictional questions on things like data privacy rights.

Because the next question that comes after "why was NSA sidestepping the Constitution by peeking at the data abroad?" is "wait, why was my data over in Europe??", just as Germany is now considering making an EU-centric e-mail so that their citizens' data remains safe from being treated under American law.

"We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun."

Weapons are not reducing in cost and size every year. It's possible in principle to know if someone has a weapon, and to exclude them from a given small area. Weapons have only a few specific uses (defense, hunting, target shooting or sparring, crime), and don't gain hundreds of new kinds of uses every week.

The soaking of our society in computing power and recording is proceeding rapidly, and I don't think it can be stopped in any given jurisdiction without severely impacting the ability of that jurisdiction's business to compete economically. The ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on what individuals can record implies a police state, even if the police are kindly for now.

I notice that people now calmly mention that they partially disagree with Brin, rather than dismissing his transparent society as completely beyond the pale.

"'We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.' Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child's rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. 'So now they have to run everything.' The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind ... The only trouble was, no despot had the resources to plan every detail in his society's behavior. Not even planet-wrecker bombs had as dire a reputation for eliminating civilizations."

--Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky