Does the Cloud of Surveillance Have a Silver Lining?

For hundreds of years, governments of all parties have accepted the hypocrisy of talking about the sanctity of mail while opening letters in the interests of national diplomacy and international security. All we´ve done recently is add telephony, mobile telephony, and email to the list of communications that are monitored and lied about. When surveillance is beneficial, it can usually be done in the open. If we want to encourage government programs that reduce tax evasion via location tracking, we could do so publicly. Or, if we want to improve public health by training sniffer dogs in transport hubs to identify individuals suffering from diabetes, we could do that without secrecy. However, dual-use technologies are difficult to manage if one of the uses can´t be spoken about.