Force people to behave how you like, bend them to your will and to subjugate somebody.

That doesn’t end with surveillance, though. You have to show your hand at some point, or people will (not unreasonably) assume they’re in your blind spot and can behave as they please. That’s why you might get those annoying “Hello this is your ISP, please stop violating the Millennium Copyright Act or we’ll disconnect you” emails if you’re not torrenting behind a VPN. Also why a random woman in Florida made headline news for saying “Deny. Delay. Depose.” to her insurance broker. Its not about real time universal surveillance so much as terrorizing people into thinking they’re a person of interest.

And ultimately, every bit of knowledge, every fact they know (and process) makes them smarter and gets them ahead of the situation and in control.

There are limits. A lot of this stuff is still just a game of percentages. You have a pool of 100M end users and you can whittle that down to 5M potential suspects. And then maybe you can get it to 100k people you seriously think are up to some shit. And then you get it all the way down to 5k people who are really truly dangerous, based on some mathematical heuristic. But then you have to do… what? Actually go peep in someone’s window or dig through their trash to see what’s up.

Meanwhile, you’re banking heavily on the other 99.995M people not flying off the handle when you weren’t actively looking.

Far easier to cultivate or outright manufacture radicals to target and do high profile arrests on. That’s why you’ll find police organizations like the FBI and the NYPD running honeypot websites and local groups, dangling bait and waiting for the radicals to come to them.

Edit: And I’m far more worried about more mundane and less conspiratory dynamics. Corporate greed ruining a lot of things. The attention economy and very unhealthy separation of society. Filter bubbles. The enshittification of the internet from all sides. That’s all way more prominent than what the NSA does.

Everything has its role. The NSA is, for the most part, outwardly facing. And a lot of its role is offensive rather than defense. But you do still occasionally see the knock-on effects downstream. The NSA trying to shut down Iranian nuclear energy with the Stuxnet Virus, for instance, blew back on the US in a big way. In the same way, Radio Free Asia doing anti-China agitprop all over the Pacific Rim gave us the Marcos and Duterte regimes in the Philippines and the chronic resurgence of the Park family and its allies in South Korea. That fuels religious radicalism and narco-trafficking in the region, which eventually comes back to the US in a big way.

Enshittification in pursuit of bigger and bigger profits is certainly its own problem. But it is only possible because smaller and less surveilled competitor media is either strangled in the cradle or bought out by the bigger fish. TikTok getting forced into sale to American investors, Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio prosecuted for insider trading after he refused to open up his telecom company to the NSA, Japanese car companies threatened with tariffs and sanctions unless they insourced their factories to the American Gulf Coast.

These systems work hand-in-glove. Enshittification is a consequence of the consolidation that state intervention allows. And state intervention is encouraged by big private interests seeking to weed out competition in exchange for more compliance with federal spying.