&gt; You&#x27;re saying, &quot;We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn&#x27;t agree with in the past&quot;. This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. I would be unhappy if people said &quot;I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn&#x27;t be trusted to do his job ever again.&quot;<p>Yes, you would be unhappy. But this is not about whether you are unhappy, but whether you should have control over military, police, our tax money, and thus everyone&#x27;s lives.<p>It simply is a very well established fact that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous, and that they are extremely hard to break up once you recognize they are heading in the wrong direction. Just look at what the problem is in countries where people are doing badly, both historically and right now, and why things are so extremely hard to improve once they have gone bad. Which is why we have built structures that try to prevent such concentrations of power from forming. That is essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers: To build distrust into the system. Dictatorships are the opposite of that (only one power, and no mechanism to remove the person in office). Yes, democratically elected officials certainly are unhappy when they are voted out - but that is the price we pay to prevent concentrations of power from forming.<p>And surveillance is undermining democratic decisionmaking. Having a democracy now does not guarantee you a democracy tomorrow if you aren&#x27;t careful in who and what you vote for.<p>&gt; If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.<p>Yes, &quot;we&quot; will. If history can teach us something, we can expect that it will take about a decade at least, with many unhappy lives, maybe millions of deaths, until foreign military gets into it to &quot;deal with it&quot;.<p>Sure, maybe that won&#x27;t happen. But given the prospects, wouldn&#x27;t it be wise to use our experience from history, to try and make predictions where things will lead, and to then try and prevent things from happening in the first place?<p>You are aware, for example, that Hitler was democratically elected into office, and all his powers were given to him democratically? And you are aware what it took to remove him from office afterwards?