&gt;So when people worry about the surveillance state I just smirk. None of it actually works in any useful way, it&#x27;s all security theatre.<p>This was what I always suspected pre-Snowden: that the government simply wasn&#x27;t capable of creating a system to effectively monitor all internet traffic because they didn&#x27;t have the technical chops. Which, in, say, 2001, might have been true.<p>Turned out all they needed was time and money and they had both and then once it was revealed that they <i>could</i> do it and actually do it rather well it came as a shock (to me, at least).<p>Two years ago was a long time in camera and facial recognition technology.