The most common way for any governmental institution to aggrandize onto itself ever more power is to convince the general public that such power is necessary in order to best protect them – therefore, the people must relinquish some of their liberty for the security which the government thus provides for them. Oftentimes, this is structured in a way and manner in which the government sells the story that these liberties so being sacrificed are not only for the greater good but that such a sacrifice is only for a finite amount of time; however, experience tells us that liberties that have been forfeited seldom come back to the fore, and even when they do, those liberties have effectively been hollowed out. This thus signifies that there must be a reasonable balance between security and liberty, for that government that has the power to provide lock-tight safety, is the very same government that has then in its hands firm control of our most precious liberties.
There needs to be a fair balance between security and liberty, for governments have a habit of enacting more and more measures that are meant to be for the citizen’s safety, of which, those measures so taken are in many a case, far more intrusive, than what reasonableness requires. After all, when the powers that be are above the law, it doesn’t matter much to them, how much liberty is thereupon left to the general public, for those who are the power brokers, have what they desire to have, typically at the expense of the people. Further to the point, to have strong security in place necessitates, therefore, the people being monitored and those that are in power, decide then what is best to activate that security, per what they envision, which probably will not be in harmonic conformance with enumerated Constitutional powers.
The crux of the problem with sacrificing some degree of liberty for security is that this often becomes a slippery slope, of which, in the beginning, such sacrifice doesn’t appear to be any real big deal, but as time goes on, the erosion of liberties gets even worse, and slowly those that are the people, that are supposed to have a government, of, for, and by the people, find themselves no longer being governed by the consent of the governed, but rather are perceived as nothing much more than subjects, for the government to thereby do with them, as that unanswerable government best sees fit.
So too, when the government knows everything about us, but that same government is opaque to the general public, then the balance between the government and the people is out of whack; thereupon leading to all sorts of abuses, for by the lack of liberty, the people no longer have recourse to justice, for that has essentially been sacrificed to safety, of which, that security having been unequally applied, benefits not really the people, but rather benefits those that are its actuators, so that these elite entities, have gained the security to know that they cannot be successfully assailed, and the people have not the liberty anymore to prevent such.