After Edward Snowden’s revelations had been publically discussed for months, I can only claim: did nobody see this coming? Because there is a clear precedent: NSA’s Project SHAMROCK collected all telegraphic data entering or exiting the United States from 1945 to 1975. And more recently, the gargantuan scale of the Great Firewall of China was an omen of what more advanced countries could built to spy on its citizenship.
Privacy will be gradually eroded, being a weak private right and a strong public wrong whenever facing the presumption of illegalities, and prosecution laws are already being modified to be more accepting of evidence gathered through warrantless surveillance programs, especially in common-law countries where police forces have ample power to interpret the law. And if in the future all surveillance is perfectly automated with almost no human intervention, who would really care of the invasion of privacy if done by amoral and unsentient machines?
What I really find fascinating is that Snowden’s revelations haven’t brought us any advanced technology: it’s almost like the NSA didn’t have any real technology edge over current commercial technologies, which I don’t really buy into. Meanwhile, the private sector develops and markets some technologies like PredPol for real-time crime prediction: an excellent predictor of what’s to come.