No.<p>A state has the right and responsibility to fight criminal activity, so one could argue that surveillance, data-sharing between intelligence agencies and policing are necessary for governments to fulfill the obligation that their monopoly on violence entails. No sane person, not even the most die-hard anti-statist anarchist, wants to live in a world where something like the Paris attacks go unpunished.<p>But, after Snowden, we&#x27;ve observed that scaling the surveillance power of the state doesn&#x27;t apparently lead to greater security, only the desire for greater and greater power. How many credible terrorist attacks have actually been foiled by the apparent global panopticon the world has been living under? The truth is, we don&#x27;t really know, and the answer is probably n &gt; 0, but there are obvious cases where the system has failed, despite that.<p>The implication hidden in questions like this is that the latest attacks could only have been prevented if governments had <i>more</i> surveillance power, more control over autonomy, more ability to project arbitrary force around the world, regardless of sovereignty. Yet no amount of power will allow a government to be right in preventing crime 100% of the time, it&#x27;s impossible. Even if systems like Tor and cryptocurrencies allow some criminal activity to thrive (and are arguably intended to do so,) it&#x27;s better for the sake of free society and civil liberty to have the state be half-blind than all-seeing.<p>I don&#x27;t know what a proper balance looks like, but I am certain it&#x27;s weighted too far on the side of government power as it is. We should continue working to interfere with and to reduce the surveillance powers of governments, support pervasive encryption, and to oppose greater collaboration between government agencies, particularly across national lines. Doing otherwise only further legitimizes the violations of human rights that have already come with global surveillance, rendition camps, drone strikes against civilians, etc. The actual threat from terrorism throughout much of the Western world doesn&#x27;t appear to be commensurate to the degree of power that the governments of the world are demanding to be able to fight it.