Uncle Whiskers is watching where you buy grits. Just in case they ever figure in a home-made bomb.

At Slog, Dominic Holden has a chilling view of the surveillance state Boston has revealed. An excerpt:

So the question isn't whether they are ever beneficial or should ever be used (again, everyone agrees that sometimes they should be), but how much America throws itself whole-hog and billions of dollars into blanketing the nation with a permanent video surveillance network. The ACLU's Debelak warns that "such persistent monitoring would have serious costs to our freedom." Most troubling for the ACLU is misappropriation of the footage to spy on political protesters, and using high-level surveillance for low-level crimes that, in essence, criminalize poverty. 

As most everyone online knows, cameras are a very small part of the government's growing surveillance network: More significant is the vast, largely invisible, mines of electronic data.

Every day, we're all generating loads of records: bank transactions, bus passes, text messages, tweets, and probably lots of other trails we're not even conscious of. The CIA seems intent on sweeping all of that data and saving it indefinitely. The CIA's chief technology officer, Gus Hunt, spoke last month about their strategy, saying, "The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever." The CIA has also reportedly committed $600 million to Amazon for cloud computing services—apparently to save all those data. 

The result is sort of what we we saw this last week: The federal government turned on its surveillance system (for a good cause). But it's the vastness of that system and public support to expand surveillance that has privacy hounds concerned (that it could be used for bad). And since we don't know how much data the government is tracking, it's nearly impossible to file a complaint in court to challenge it. It's like going bow-hunting for deer in a dark forest. 

Yes, yes, yes. 

I know. 

Privacy is already lost, cameras are already around, our activity is already recorded. What's it matter if the government installs a few million new cameras in urban centers? What's left to give up? Why even have the conversation?

There are plenty of surveillance experts and critics who could answer those questions in ways much more intelligently than I ever could. In fact, I contacted several experts for this post, and many asked not to go on the record. The national ACLU declined to be interviewed last week because "we're not commenting on this today," a spokesman told me; I interviewed an academic who later asked not to be named or quoted. And I get that: Anyone who questions a surveillance state in this rah-rah environment risks being ridiculed as a naive Pollyanna liberal (I'm sure some comments on this post—if anyone even reads this long, boring, hand-wringing post—will accuse me of practically being a terrorist sympathizer). But so what if raising these questions is politically toxic? The liberals protesting the Iraq War were mocked (even by this newspaper), and anyone who questioned the Patriot Act was considered a traitor (it was called the "Patriot Act" for a reason). But those dissenters were right. They weren't Pollyanna, they were Cassandra.

Terrorism is about instilling fear, about wanting you to believe that menace is behind every bush. To be played by a terrorist is to behave like menace actually is everywhere, to prepare for crime behind every corner by stationing a camera or willingly relinquishing all digital privacy.

"Even though this [bombing] is a very rare event, we tend to exaggerate the threat going down the road," Molnar points out. "There is very little that closed circuit television can do to actually prevent an attack. We are not just introducing technology to prevent, deter, or enhance possibility for arrest and capture, we are also changing the way we relate to one another."

"We turn communities of trust into communities of fear," he warns.