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FiftyTwo comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion
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Total government surveillance would actually increase net happiness in developed countries significantly. (So cameras on every street, and if practical every bedroom. All emails, phone calls etc are kept on record to be examined by police when necessary)
We object to it out of a primal fear of being observed, internalised guilt about our actions and a cultural backlash against authoritarian governments.
After reflection, I think this is my true rejection of total government surveillance. There are plenty of relatively unproblematic actions that are technically illegal but most people do anyway (soft drug use, copyright infringement, etc.), but right now few people are prosecuted so few people are particularly bothered by the laws. Introducing total government surveillance without repealing such laws first would essentially give arbitrary powers to law enforcement.
There's also the problem of industrial espionage. If the government is able to spy on people, then corporations will be able to get the police to spy on people from other corporations.
Funnily enough I'm writing something about the 'right' to privacy right now, and that comic is one of the best principled arguments I've come across. [This may tell you something about the field.]
The counter is that laws can be changed, and a lot of current laws are only popularly accepted because they are unevenly enforced. E.g. if the middle class were at any real risk of arrest from drug possession sentences would be nowhere near as harsh.
Yeah. I'd like to eventually go from unreasonable laws that aren't actually consistently enforced to reasonable laws that are actually consistently enforced, but unless both components switch at the same time there are going to be troubles in the process (arguably worse problems if the enforcement component switches sooner than the reasonableness component). Also, there's the problem that not everybody would agree with which laws would be reasonable, e.g. there are plenty of middle-aged and older people (in Italy at least) who seem to actually believe that marijuana had better stay banned (yes, most of those people probably have only a vague idea of what marijuana actually does, but still).
Make that "centralized governments"; there is in fact no logical contradiction between democracy and total surveillance. Generally, in every case where people consider the Hobbesian Leviathan, they forget that Hobbes himself considered a democratically shaped Leviathan to be somewhat inferior but perfectly possible.
I didn't say there was, just that there is a general societal association between surveillance and bad things. (Surveillance -> Secret Police -> Scary governments doing bad stuff).
I imagine if the dominant cultural narrative of the last century was of centralised and authoritarian but benevolent states social attitudes would be a lot different. As it is all those features are lumped together into totalitarianism in the popular consciousness.
This perception makes people unwilling to support/vote/campaign for privacy reducing options even when there is an obvious net benefit (e.g. DNA and fingerprint databases would solve a lot of crimes at minimal cost in western liberal democracies).