Leaving a Better World, the Surveillance State Edition

So recently I've been thinking a bit about the old adage, meant to serve as sorta a litmus test for the longer-term value of decisions: try to leave the world a better place for your children. I don't honestly know the origin of the sentiment, and/or if it's American or otherwise, but it seems self-evident enough in meaning. Basically, you want the world to get better over time, and especially if you have children directly, you want them to live in a world which is at least as accommodating as the one you lived in.

The thing is, though, that's not always easy to do. The world has quite a lot of "bad" people in it, and absent meaningful efforts toward positive change, there's certainly no guarantee that the world of the future will be better than the world of today. This seems especially true in the current time in the US in particular; the list of pending worrisome things is getting quite long indeed (eg: spiraling national debt, partisan divisiveness driving the country apart, wealth inequality, the unchecked rise of AI, rekindled threats of nuclear war, etc.). One of the other rising threats which stands out to me more recently is the surveillance state, and the end of personal freedom.

Now, people have never had an explicit right to privacy; that's not something codified in the US Constitution, nor really even enshrined in law. We've always enjoyed a semi-implicit amount of freedom from observation, though, owing to the lack of ability for the state to monitor everything at all times. This freedom is implicit, for example, in much of the historical exercise of the right of assembly, protest, freedom of the press, etc. After all, in most historical cases, if the government had full surveillance of all aspects of those activities, they either would have been implicitly suppressed, or explicitly so, using some justification (eg: the ever ubiquitous "national security", invoked to justify all manner of atrocities against the people).

This implicit freedom, though, is going away, and absent some sort of dramatic shift, might be entirely gone in our lifetime. Already the government monitors effectively all personal communications, using advanced AI to filter through the incomprehensibly large data sets for keywords/persons of "interest". All telephone conversations are recorded and logged (through Echelon, along with undoubtedly newer versions of the same), all social media data is mined (Prism and related), all internet communications are tapped, etc. Governments are even now passing legislation to make strong encryption illegal, in the few cases where it might otherwise be inaccessible (and/or to disguise pre-existing compromises). Drones are being deployed by the state to monitor people 24/7 from the skies; the DoT is even currently working on approving civilian usage as such.

By the time today's children are adults, they will not know a world where the state cannot know everything that you do, always. China is already using this reality to their advantage, through "social credit" scoring designed to forcibly control the behavior of their population, and the US will do effectively the same thing. Astute parents are already carefully monitoring their kids' online activities to try to ensure they don't inevitably damage their future "social scores" (in whatever form they come to be), by trying to curtail social media posts and recorded speech, but in most cases the damage will not be prevented, and/or is already done. The next generation will not be able to express dissent, lest they find themselves enemies of the state, with all that entails.

Indeed, I struggle to even conceptualize a scenario when the world today's children will inherit is better in that respect than it is today. The rise of the surveillance state is as inevitable as the existence of the bad people in it, and as predictable as the corrupt politicians who will exploit it. Today's children will inherit a world where privacy, and the implicit freedoms attached to it and dependent on it, are but a memory of a past which will by then seem like a utopian fantasy. That's what we're leaving for our children today, and honestly, I see no viable alternative path. As the quote goes, "I know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail nonetheless." This is the world which we will leave for our children, in its depressing inevitability.