On the other hand, actions that require actually sending men in suits and vans filled surveillance equipment can be costly. If they're doing that, you know you're in big trouble.
I'm sorry but I have to jump in here - you're writing off an awful lost of resources under the banner of "they just have to type some commands."
My point is that it is the human part of surveillance that is costly. For everything that can be collected automatically with systems already in place (even though placing those systems could have been very expensive), the threshold to use it is very low. When the information is collected and processed, what rests is only database queries. "automatic surveillance" is (comparatively) cheap.
In contrast, "expensive surveillance" is placing monitoring equipment in a house, parking some fan sneakily around the block to listen in, and such. It's labour and resource intensive.
[citation needed]
So effectively, yes, it's free for the people who do it.
I highly recommend reading http://jontaplin.com/the-cost-of-empire/ , get the PDF if the images are not loading.
