As the author notes, we&#x27;ve tread this ground before when J. Edgar Hoover essentially ran the country via intimidation&#x2F;blackmail for decades. It always shocks me that Hoover&#x27;s reign is mentioned so lightly. Democracy wasn&#x27;t functioning during those decades because one unelected individual had hugely outsized power.<p>NSA surveillance is a backdoor to democracy because it enables blackmailing of politicians or inconvenient people. The CIA does this all the time abroad using information the NSA gathered.