I remember nostalgically when this kind of thing would have been so unpopular in the USA, including (especially?) among the "populist right", that it would not have happened.

The escalation of the surveillance security state has been quick and vast.

It's still unpopular. The difference today is that the public is so thoroughly disempowered, that there is nothing you can do to change/resist it. Point me to the major political party, or even individual candidate, where "dismantling surveillance" is even a minor part of their platform. There are probably a single digit number of politicians in the entire country, from federal all the way down to local, who are against surveillance.

> surveillance security state

The only security is of those in power. For ordinary people it gets more unsafe with every measure.

I remember maybe a decade ago talking to a person in computer security. What I was surprised was a strange turn of events in the 'exploits' arena. Although they monitored exploits/cert/etc, they also monitored the people who were involved in exploits.

I kind of wonder if the political arena is quietly doing the same thing. Instead of targeting dissenting opinions, it might be possible and effective to target the people with dissenting opinions.

sort of scary.

How much of that, at least among elites, is due to looking at China's dizzying development, bound straight for the singularity, while the old appeals to liberty and rights seem to have only got the USA bogged down in gridlock and squabbling?

Revolutions happen, inter alia, to break gridlock, whether consciously or unconsciously. The rise of the surveillance state might be seen as the coup by elites that is one of the known forms of revolution.

its almost like there a special interest group working behind the scenes that has been simultaneously developing expertise in maintaining surveillance state technology and is motivated to maintain strict control over american public opinion to manage those resistant to their manufactured consent mechanism.

Of course that would require decades of testing and refining the technology on a people so conditioned for us to malign that our mainstream shows can make jokes about their dead babies and only be met with applause.

I haven't fully made up my mind here, but I'm thinking that (most forms of) privacy is simply no longer viable due to technological advances. Mass collection of data is getting cheaper and cheaper, so these databases will be built. If not by the state than by corporations. And if laws prevent corporations, then by those operating outside the law like intelligence agencies (including foreign ones) and organized crime.

Having the government be the only ones without the data is a weird situation.