I think states are meant to keep identities at every step - ID cards, social security number, KYCs, passports etc.

So, state's surveillance never ends until we snatch away the freedom in form of new protocols like matrix, nostr, simplex. or If govt. is wise enough to understand and employ people like Snowden to make policies for their citizens which is highly unlikely.

It's not about government hoarding our data, it's more about state failing to protect our data which it hoarded and use it in indiscriminate ways. As said by Snowden, in Citienfour:

“First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me”

I don't believe it is political. I believe it is about accuracy in the data.

They will continue to surveil whilst they have the tools and capacity to do so. They are not going to give it up, when data is more valuable in the future than any commodity.

I believe it ends, when they can't trust their own data for any logical reasoning, because the data has been so conveniently de-anonymized or encrypted as a digital blob. And because more individuals or small businesses are making their own hardware & software, due to nanotechnology. Which the majority of people in their communities day to day are using. It needs to be meaningless for them to surveil any longer. And so I would gauge that the threshold is higher at say 40%.

I would also guestimate 10% of the world already knows that surveillance is an issue. That it is injust and indiscriminate. But the vast majority of those people think it is 'always going to be that way' and that there's nothing to do about it.

To get to this position, Governments have only had to put the boot on the neck of so many large corporates. To legislate, regulate and build standards that enable their influence to continue & even grow. To let them grow and succeed.

Most people in the Western world are all onboard with the climate debate and willing to build the walls to their own shoe box. To track their own energy expenditure with smart metres, to read their own carbon usage on train or plane tickets, to pay without cash or to be watched by 5,827 hideous city cameras pointing in their face, or sticking Ring doorbells & cams not only on their front-door but their fences and garages, and even inside their homes etc.

It's been happening for over a decade now and we have likely only just got started. Big Governments have buy-in. So I don't believe this ends anytime soon.

I think we'll see other cracks in the system appear on the world stage first. Surveillance will not be one of them. The exception or wildcard to this would be if the entire suite of Facebook databases is dumped on the black market tomorrow. Then you may see some level of political change. But I suspect people eat it. And this is not in Government interests as they would then have no riches to exploit. If data is indeed the new oil, it should continue to be drained until those reserves run out.

My gut response is when the state can no longer afford to suveil.

Another complication is that you have to define what exactly constitutes surveillance.

If you throw out that term, and instead consider a continuum where on one side you have total obliviousness (state isn't aware that you exist at all) and on the other total panopticon-ness (state has total awareness of you in every moment) then it starts to feel tractable.

Although then you have the same issue with what constitutes "the state" which is easy to talk about and less easy to define, esp now. Given that the degree of being surveilled is split across innumerable entities, with various levels of influence on your life and that interact in complicated ways --

that's why I find this rhetorical question hard to think about, anyway. You can't pry the elements apart.

Good question. This guy tells me 99% of classified data is useless; but it's classified because of the way it's collected. If China is almost good enough to surveil a jaywalker and have the fine come out of their account before reaching the other side, I'm really bullish on censorship resistant money to start. Like if we look at what casinos can already do, or how effective Bellingcat is with OSINT, then consider government, with all their data, various databases, behavior algos, camera patching, then it feels despairing, cuz Ai can collate all that into neat squares tucked away to be recalled as circumstances demand, ie, whenever you show up on a public camera. It's like Minority Report stuff. But if it's out of sight, server-side, and privileged, then we're like a bunch of conspiracy theorists. We need whisteblowers, and federal laws, and likeminded supreme court justices, and education, and FOSS. 20% sounds pretty good, whatever the hell it takes to form a durable coalition.

Not states are watching you... corporations are doing all that.

So act accordingly. Everything in this world is driven by contracts. Send them the bill to pay.

Any state activity will end when it becomes unprofitable. Profitability also depends on the target individual, e.g. someone using strong encryption is expensive to surveil. Someone leaving a lot of traces on social media is cheap to surveil etc.

Thanks, very good points. I think You need a fiscal collapse that will force normieland to accept that the state is a fragile leviathan. Then the ''sovereign'' fights back.

When the state collapses.