There has never been a time, except for short periods, where the ruling class has had full access to what everyone has been saying or thinking. There has always been constraints on how much they can know about the populace. Distance, cost, manpower have all been age old constraints. A new technology usually makes it easy to monitor but then something else comes in the way to block it. I think Stasi are probably the only real-successful blanket monitoring.

What are you talking about? Do you really think that the king of England had a better view into his subjects inner thoughts in the 18th century than literally anyone can currently do by pulling up anyone’s social media presence? You don’t need to read private text messages to know what people are up to. They tweet, post on Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok about it all the time.

> They don't want new powers, they want their old powers back

Maybe you're too young to remember a time when no one carried a GPS in their pocket, most payments were done in cash and only banks had CCTV cameras. I'd love to see states and companies take back the "powers" they had back then :)

> They don't want new powers, they want their old powers back

I don't agree. They want both. They want more!

Yes, this makes good sense.

I think newspapers mostly report the news. They also have things called opinion pages but those tend to be clearly marked as such and then there is this thing called advertising.

Yes.

Sure, 'bring me some potatoes tomorrow'.

What will happen tomorrow?

But terrorist suspect 'A' communicating with arms supplier 'B' is far more significant than terrorist suspect 'A' communicating with arms supplier 'B' asking 'B' to bring some potatoes tomorrow.

The value can definitely be in the payload, when both parties believe they are using a secure channel, see 'Encrochat' and a couple of others like it. But most of the time the things you should really worry about are going to look like 'bring me some potatoes'.

Boots on the ground, enough people to follow up on the leads available today would help a lot, and a budget to go with it to make that sustainable. Not more tech toys.

Anyway, I've written enough about this subject by now.

I agree but for a different reason. It's simply not effective. Unrest can never be ameliorated by squashing it because censorship will always be routed around. Any attempt at pushing it down will result in it popping up somewhere else, sometimes in a different form. The only remedy is improving the material conditions for the majority of people.

In every revolution we've seen, the elites are unable to comprehend or unwilling to compromise, and in every case, the longer it drags on, the more dispossessed they eventually become. US state population trends starting in the 1840s are currently generating increasing unrest as a function of the structure of the US senate resulting in a rule by minority. As the chamber becomes increasingly unrepresentative, the ability to reform it becomes increasingly less probably due to the structure of constitutional reform.

In a more perfect world, US population geographics would be modulated by representative power. That however, is not the case. State and local governments increasingly sort voters by self-selection bias. Further entrenchment and unwillingness to compromise will be gasoline for the current tinder.

Then you better hope that you have an ear to the ground.

The reason why plots get uncovered is usually because someone is stupid, not because of some exceedingly clever bit of code breaking. And let's be thankful for the fact that terrorism wouldn't work if all they were aiming for is mass death of their foes because for all of the fear that terrorists manage to sow they are cumulatively less effective over the course of 40 years than three days worth of COVID deaths,

Traffic analysis is a thing.