I believe the entire western world is sleep walking into totalitarianism. It's soft glove right now, but mass surveillance, no matter what the original purpose, only needs concentration of power to turn into something truly inhumane. We've seen it already and that was well before technology pushed the boundaries of what is now possible.

I just want to remind everyone that the technology and the police and all of that crap utterly failed to prevent the attacks at Brown and MIT. Total and complete failure. The only thing that mattered was some burned out genius that the world forgot who was illegally living the basement of the engineering building because he had literally nowhere else to go. And then they didn't even catch the killer, he controlled all the events and killed himself two entire days before he was found.

Mass surveillance is a false god as are background checks and pretty much every other measure human take to try and feel safer because there is no safety and never was.