When the "THEY" of tomorrow are handed the keys to this vast panopticon that they didn't have to build themselves, how will "THEY" behave. No one can be sure.
Consider the men that inherited the ash heap of Europe after WWI. What did those men do?
They started WWII.
The current challenge is global terrorism, but the swing towards authoritarianism by Western governments may end up being FAR worse than the threat of terrorism.
And we're not swinging towards authoritarianism. That's absolutely a lie. Want to know the irony in you saying that? That you can say that, and not fear your door being knocked down and you being questioned. You don't know authoritarianism if you think the US is headed that way. Authoritarianism is not being able to criticize the government. Authoritarianism is the inability to change the government. Authoritarianism is a very loaded word, and your misuse of it only clouds the real problems the US government has, of which there are undeniably many.
People like you who go chicken-little constantly by bandying about words like "authoritarianism" create huge political blockage, which causes government standstills like what we're seeing in congress today. Lawmakers are afraid to do anything, because every time they try, it ends with some lawmaker or another being portrayed as eating children under a bridge somewhere, and his/her constituents buy it enough to oust him/her, despite just trying to make this country a better place.
Looking across the pond at England, they went from filtering the internet to block child porn, to filtering the internet to block extremists in less than one year. You have UK law enforcement harassing and intimidating legitimate journalism about the out of control surveillance state.
Maybe none of that is alarming to you, and maybe you don't think any of those things are along the road that leads to an authoritarian state, but I and many others feel differently. Either way, just because my perception of events is different that yours doesn't make my perception a lie.
And have had them for many many years. Nothing new. We committed a genocide against a people in the 1900s, and enslaved another people in the 1800s, both of which I think are much worse things to do to people than where we are now. If you chart the kinds of freedoms people living in the US have throughout the US's existence, would you really try to say the average person is less free today? Obviously we're not done working on being better at that, and absolutely we slip, but I'm so sick and tired of this attitude that we're moving into a totalitarian state, when we only in the last 100ish years LEFT what amounted to one.
And a small point of order but obviously no, my perception isn't any more valid than yours, but there is an objective perception, and if your perception is not aligned with that objective flagpost, then yes, your perception is a lie.
No two people have the same life experience.
The very rawest form of perceptual subjectivity can be demonstrated by the interference of vision and sound caused by the McGurk effect. Search youtube for an example.
Being in a place where "authoritarianism" is one bad actor away is not a good place to be. If you feel that we 1) are not in that such a place, and 2) are not likely to be any time soon, then feel free to make that case.
I don't see any position of power that could act in such a way so as to gain unilateral control of the US government.
If they actually were doing all the awful things people keep saying they could do, e.g. congressional blackmail, the person doing those things would be shut down in a heartbeat. Do you honestly think the head of ANY government organization couldn't be dealt with if they went legitimately rogue?
And yes, it more or less does suggest it. It is very far from conclusive or I would be a lot more worried.
> Being in a place where "authoritarianism" is one bad actor away is not a good place to be.
If that's not what you meant, then what did you mean?
I really don't see how you can assert that the things I listed aren't more likely in an environment where those holding power in secret are extending and exercising that power, than in an environment where they are not, which is what it means to be evidence.