There is a sense in which no man can be ruled who does not permit it. People in the aggregate prefer the results of letting governments take charge of things, and a host of cultural and contextual factors affect that, all of which are subject to some manipulation. So governments, once they have folks convinced they are legitimate, can proceed to change the rules later. Should anyone notice and object, they are likely to suffer. Should too many of them object, the game is over; the state will suffer.
The most free man of all is the one who knows what is really important, and has no trouble rendering to Caesar what is his, but can easily bear the consequences when Caesar objects to withholding things Caesar should not claim.
If you use the Internet, you might expect a modicum of privacy. Most of the time, you get it simply because you are one of billions and the snoops have time to examine only those few they target. Government would love to have endless capacity to monitor and enforce, but simply cannot. The state may come close at times, but this too shall pass. So even with the massive store rooms of server space and whole yottabytes of data, they still have to process it, and if anything actionable is detected, someone has to make the decision to execute that action. Knowing about you and doing something about it are two entirely different projects. Only so much can be automated. But keeping them out of your business simply won’t happen, for pretty much the same reason you can’t really enforce copyrights on the Net.
Once digitized, endless copying is just too easy. Once you encode your thoughts as digitized words, it’s wide open. Ditto for pictures, voice and video. The only way to keep it private is keep it off the Net. If you use the Net, it’s not private; that’s the nature of the beast. Indeed, there is no such thing as pure privacy, since every sound or action can be recorded, should someone take the time to place the devices for it in enough locations. We approach that now, at least in terms of the surveillance equipment now in place publicly, but planting such devices in private space is all too easy these days. Consider how little is the portion of your cellphone which includes the capacity for taking snapshots and videos. You’ll also notice the rush to pass laws to prevent private individuals from turning those weapons against agents of the state. Laws don’t mean much in a digital world, though.
So when the state demands digital access, no one should be surprised when the state can’t control all the uses of that access. Why do agents of the state somehow imagine they alone can do this stuff? Why are they always surprised when some clever cracker gets past their barriers? There are some really intelligent people in government service, but in the main, there aren’t that many. And it seems every time some new effort is made to grant the state more power through its agents, it soon turns out they have less competence in using that power than someone who would refuse to work for the government.
Do not fear the state. The power of government is always limited by the competence of those who wield its power. Truly competent people tend to avoid such power because it means compromising their competence by submitting to the bureaucracy which dehumanizes and deadens everything it touches. The secular state is organized death, and that death feeds upon itself. The secular state carries the seeds of its own destruction. You can refuse to live under such a thing.
