why do governments love snooping?

Whilst technology has given us the internet and all the benefits and problems it comes with, the ability to capture and process vast quantities of data means that governments can also snoop on their citizens with unprecedented detail.

A long time ago my father visited Soviet Russia, staying at an official tourist hotel. At that time the KGB controlled the hotels as the state needed to ensure tourists did only what was allowed, and particularly to control the black market and the flow of highly desired western currency!

One of the parties in my father's group noticed that there were floors in the hotel that the lift wouldn't access without a key, and being an engineer and tinkerer managed to fiddle with the lock and send the lift to the "hidden" floor. When the door opened, he observed a whole row of people sitting at benches with headphones, and suddenly a security guard ushered him back into the lift where he was escorted back to the proper places.

Such monitoring was labour intensive, and had to be targeted simply due to lack of resources. Technology allows snooping on global scale without the vast army of people to do the monitoring.

The same technology that allows you to carry music on a tiny memory card also allows speech-quality recording of everything you hear and say every waking moment - a 64GB card will last over one hundred days, more if it doesn't record at night. Basically it'd be possible to plant a bug on someone that would record a whole year's worth of sound, provided you can make a battery that would last that long, a problem I'm sure that western governments have already solved.

Since pretty much all western telephone systems are digital, then logging all phone calls made with origin and recipient is trivial. Relatively few people use email encryption by default. GSM Mobile phone voice encryption has been shown to be weak, deliberately so, and even determined amateurs can snoop on calls.


So, snooping has never been easier, but why are governments so set on using it?

I'll post a few theories, but here's one the cynic in me came up with after the recent UK government's debacle on expenses. People tend to think other people are much like them, it's part of being human to relate to others and see ourselves in them. The expenses scandal showed that many Member of Parliament took advantage of the system to satisfy their own greed, there was no proper oversight and they behaved dishonourably. So, if these people assume others are like them, then they will assume every citizen is at least somewhat dishonest and will also try and cheat the system and thus need to be watched.