surveillance can turn a democratic government despotic

There are more failure modes than this.

In general, it's fairly complicated because to discuss what's good or bad about X you need a fleshed-out value framework which will allow you to make explicit what "good" and "bad" means and which will also allow you to specify shades of grey and talk about trade-offs.

It's possible to ignore this issue and just attempt to discuss what kind of situations and consequences will X lead to without evaluating things as good or bad -- but that discussion will still be colored by the values and the preferences. Having these values "invisible" and unexamined tends to... complicate discussions :-)