Peace and prosperity were possible only if people stopped asking new questions and accepted the available answers. - John Twelve Hawks

Believing that the government knows what's best is an argument that barely merits a serious discussion. Any high school history student can come up with hundreds of examples of when a king, dictator, or elected official followed a destructive, foolish policy. Democracy doesn't protect our leaders from having a limited, parochial vision. A politician's true priority is career self-preservation.

Any monitoring system that is invisible, pervasive, automatic, and permanent gives those in power the means to create a modern surveillance state. And these new states will have an authority that has detached itself from ethics and ideology. Politicians and dictators will continue to make speeches, but their words will become meaningless. This new system will see and know us. It will even predict our future behavior.

Gradually, I realized that the surveillance cameras plus the email and cell phone monitoring was creating a Virtual Panopticon – a digital prison created and maintained by computer networks that enclosed all of us within its invisible walls.