Every generation is told that this time the expansion of government surveillance will be different. The tools are newer, the threats are more complex, the administrators are more enlightened, and the safeguards are said to be stronger. Yet the resolution before us, that governments should significantly expand surveillance capabilities to enhance public safety, deserves to be judged not by novelty, but by record. On that record, the prudent answer is no.
The stakes should be stated plainly. This is not a narrow argument about one camera on one corner, or a warrant for one suspect. It is an argument about significant expansion, about increasing the state’s ability to watch, collect, store, analyze, and act on information about the public. The fact sheet points to Michel Foucault’s account of panopticism and the carceral society, and while his language is theoretical, the underlying warning is institutional and practical. A government that acquires the capacity to observe broadly does not merely solve crimes. It changes the relationship between citizen and state.
Proponents of expanded surveillance make a serious case, and it should be taken seriously. They argue, first, that modern threats are networked and fast moving, while government remains too reactive. Surveillance cameras, data analysis, biometric systems, and broader monitoring can, in theory, deter crime, identify patterns, speed emergency response, and prevent violence before it occurs. They also argue that public safety is not an abstraction. Assault, terrorism, trafficking, organized crime, and disorder impose real costs, especially on vulnerable communities that cannot buy private security or retreat from unsafe streets. There is force in that argument. Government does owe a duty of care. It cannot simply recite civil liberties while neglecting basic order.
But a historically minded assessment asks the next question. What happens after the capability is built?
This is where the strongest affirmative arguments begin to weaken. The state rarely expands a surveillance power for one purpose and keeps it there. Powers introduced for emergencies migrate into ordinary administration. Databases assembled for one threat are repurposed for another. Standards soften. Definitions widen. Temporary measures settle into bureaucratic habit. This is not paranoia. It is how institutions behave. Revenue tools become control tools. War powers drift into domestic practice. Administrative convenience steadily outruns the original public justification.
That is the real value of the Foucault reference in the Eurasia Review opinion piece. One need not accept every flourish of continental theory to recognize a durable truth in panopticism. Constant visibility disciplines conduct even when no one is actively intervening. People speak differently, assemble differently, and dissent differently when they suspect they are being watched. A surveillance state need not jail everyone to narrow the range of permissible life. It need only make citizens internalize observation.
The defenders of expansion often reply that this objection is too theoretical, that the public deserves measurable outcomes rather than philosophical unease. Fair enough. But the demand for measurable outcomes cuts both ways. Surveillance programs are often defended in sweeping language and evaluated in narrow terms. A camera may help solve a small set of crimes. A database may produce leads. A facial recognition system may improve identification under certain conditions. None of that establishes the broader proposition that governments should significantly expand surveillance capabilities. The empirical question is not whether surveillance can ever help. Of course it can. The question is whether the marginal gains in safety justify the durable increase in state power, the inevitable errors, the chilling effects, and the enlarged opportunities for abuse.
That burden has not been met.
There is another weakness in the pro-surveillance case. It treats government as a neutral instrument that can be trusted to remain properly targeted if only the initial intent is sound. History gives little reason for that confidence. Surveillance does not operate in a vacuum. It is filtered through political incentives, administrative bias, prosecutorial ambition, and public fear. The groups most heavily watched are rarely the most powerful. The carceral society does not descend evenly. It lands hardest on dissidents, minorities, migrants, the poor, and those already most entangled with the state.
Some advocates attempt a narrower defense. They concede the risk of abuse but insist that stronger regulation can control it. This concession makes their case more credible, but not ultimately persuasive. Guardrails matter, warrants matter, judicial review matters, legislative oversight matters. Yet safeguards are themselves products of political will, and political will is least reliable in periods of panic, which are precisely the periods when surveillance powers are most likely to be broadened and least likely to be restrained. Constitutional systems are designed on the assumption that power will press against its boundaries. A wise public does not answer that structural problem by significantly enlarging the power first and trusting itself to recover the limits later.
The most imaginative challenge to this critique came from the claim that governments could expand surveillance capabilities in a decentralized, community-governed way, avoiding a central panopticon. It is an ingenious attempt to escape the old dilemma, but it does not fit the resolution or the history of state power. Governments, as governments, exercise authority through institutions that tax, police, regulate, and punish. Their surveillance capabilities are meaningful precisely because they can be joined to enforcement. Once the state significantly expands the means of observation, centralization follows by function, even if the technology is distributed at the edge. Data that can trigger state action will be aggregated, standardized, subpoenaed, fused, and retained. The institutional logic is older than any platform.
The deeper issue, then, is not whether surveillance can produce a benefit. It can. The issue is whether public safety is enhanced by teaching governments that every social failure warrants broader visibility into ordinary life. That lesson has costs. It weakens the habits of restraint that free societies depend on. It shifts resources and imagination away from older, less intrusive forms of safety, competent policing within constitutional limits, stronger local institutions, environmental design, mental health intervention, and swift but lawful adjudication. It mistakes legibility for order.
A government can know more and govern worse. In fact, history suggests that bureaucracies often confuse the accumulation of information with the achievement of wisdom. Ancient censuses, early modern dossiers, secret police files, and modern digital archives all shared a conceit, that more observation would finally make society manageable. Yet states that watch too much often stop listening. They become better at cataloging populations than at cultivating trust.
Public safety is a genuine public good. That is why it must not be used as a solvent against every limit on official power. The constitutional tradition, at its best, does not deny the state the tools to investigate actual wrongdoing. It insists that such tools remain bounded, particularized, and answerable to law. Significant expansion moves in the opposite direction. It normalizes suspicionless collection, broadens discretionary monitoring, and entrenches capacities that future officeholders, less scrupulous than present ones, will inherit.
The long record is not ambiguous. Surveillance powers grow more easily than they shrink. They spread more easily than they are cabined. They are justified by urgent cases and then absorbed into ordinary governance. That is the pattern. A free people should learn from it.
Governments should protect the public, yes. But they should do so in ways that preserve the distinction between a constitutional order and a carceral society. The promise of expanded surveillance is immediate reassurance. Its price is paid slowly, institutionally, and often irreversibly. History has seen that bargain before. It is not one we should make again.