Gaul Atreides (@gaulatreides)

Some of the dumbest mass surveillance counter-signaling I've come across from people on the right as much as the left is the argument that we all have had social security IDs since 1935, and didn't have a problem with that invasion of our privacy. Well, first, there's a big difference between a government issued birth ID that is accessible only by the controlling government agaency and the individual citizen, versus cameras at every public square that record your comings and goings and upload your personal life data to multiple government and corporate server farms which can be accessed by the entire world should hackers or infiltrators decide you are persona non grata and deserve to be doxxed and hounded by rent a mobs. Second, the SS ID number was not a huge privacy-stripping innovation before the internet arrived. It was reasonably private information that the larger public could not access, unlike today when anyone with a few minutes can discover sheafs of personal info on anyone else using publicly available record-searching apps. And then disseminate that information to the entire world. Bit of a difference, I'd say, old chaps.