1. Surveillance is an instrument of power. It is part of an apparatus of control. Power need not be in-your-face to be effective: subtle, psychological, nearly invisible methods can actually be more effective.
2. While surveillance is nothing new, technological changes have given governments and corporations an unprecedented capacity to monitor everyone’s communication and movement. Surveilling everyone has became cheaper than figuring out whom to surveil, and the marginal cost has dropped. The Internet, once seen by many as a tool for emancipation, is being transformed into the most dangerous facilitator for totalitarianism ever seen.
3. Governmental surveillance is strongly linked to cyberwar. Security vulnerabilities that enable one enable the other. And, at least in the USA, the same individuals and agencies handle both jobs. Surveillance is also strongly linked to conventional warfare. As Gen. Michael Hayden has explained, “we kill people based on metadata.” Surveillance and assassination by drones are one technological ecosystem.
4. The law-enforcement narrative is wrong to position privacy as an individual good when it is, just as much, a social good. It is equally wrong to regard privacy and security as conflicting values, as privacy enhances security as often as it rubs against it.
5. Mass surveillance will tend to produce uniform, compliant, and shallow people. It will thwart or reverse social progress. In a world of ubiquitous monitoring, there is no space for personal exploration, and no space to challenging social norms, either. Living in fear, there is no genuine freedom.
6. But creeping surveillance is hard to stop, because of interlocking corporate and governmental interests. Cryptography offers at least some hope. With it, one might carve out a space free of power’s reach.

via The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work:

Of course there are radically different ways to frame mass surveillance. Consider the following way to do so, which follows often-heard thoughts from cypherpunks and surveillance studies.

Although I empathise with this narrative, as a rhetorical device, it’s weak when compared to the law-enforcement narrative. It’s more long. It’s more complicated. It’s more intellectual.

A five-year old could understand the law-enforcement narrative.

No five-year old could understand or appreciate the following:

History teaches that extensive governmental surveillance becomes political in character. As civil-rights attorney Frank Donner and the Church Commission reports thoroughly document, domestic surveillance under US FBI director J. Edgar Hoover served as a mechanism to protect the status quo and neutralize change movements.

Very little of the FBI’s surveillance-related efforts were directed at law-enforcement: as the activities surveilled were rarely illegal, unwelcome behavior would result in sabotage, threats, blackmail, and inappropriate prosecutions, instead. For example, leveraging audio surveillance tapes, the FBI’s attempted to get Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to kill himself.

U.S. universities were thoroughly infiltrated with informants: selected students, faculty, staff, and administrators would report to an extensive network of FBI handlers on anything political going on on campus. The surveillance of dissent became an institutional pillar for maintaining political order. The U.S. COINTELPRO program would run for more than 15 years, permanently reshaping the US political landscape.