Comment by sweeter

I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit.

Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose.

I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of:

working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics

we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.