It has never been easier for a totalitarian state to emerge. In the past, building a regime capable of exercising total control required enormous bureaucracy, vast resources and countless people willing to spy on their fellow citizens. Even the most ideological governments faced practical limits.
Those limits have largely disappeared.
Technology has dramatically lowered the cost of surveillance, while the erosion of traditional social bonds has made people increasingly dependent on digital platforms. As more of our lives move online, the ability to collect, analyse and store almost everything we do has become unprecedented.
Personal chats can be read. Kitchen-table conversations can be monitored, today for targeted advertising, tomorrow perhaps for political profiling. Our cars record every journey. Our phones reveal where we sleep, work and whom we visit. Smartwatches track our heartbeat, stress levels and sleep. Security cameras, Wi-Fi networks and connected devices quietly register our movements. Individually these data points seem harmless. Together they form an intimate portrait of our lives that can be analysed from anywhere in the world.
Some regimes have embraced these capabilities with enthusiasm. In Europe, too, the temptation to expand digital oversight is unmistakable. Roadside camera networks and automatic number plate recognition now cover large parts of our road network. Introduced for public safety, they are increasingly used to identify and locate individuals. Low-emission zones automatically monitor every vehicle entering, issuing fines without human intervention.
Search engines remember every query, revealing our interests, fears and political leanings. Social media companies build detailed behavioural profiles from every click, like and pause. Digital payments create permanent records of where we go, what we buy and with whom we transact. As cash disappears, anonymous commerce disappears with it. Banks increasingly rely on algorithms to flag “unusual” activity, sometimes freezing accounts before any wrongdoing has been established.
The risks are no longer hypothetical. Public figures have been debanked or denied financial services because they were considered politically controversial, as Nigel Farage was by Coutts in 2023.
Meanwhile, facial recognition can identify people in airports, train stations and public squares, while AI-powered CCTV systems follow individuals across multiple camera networks. Employers monitor keystrokes, emails and computer activity. During the Covid pandemic, Western governments demonstrated how readily fundamental freedoms could be curtailed in pursuit of what they regarded as a greater public good.
Brussels has done little to reassure those concerned about these developments. Rather than acting as a guardian of liberty, it has too often sought to expand its own reach. From proposals such as Chat Control, with its implications for encrypted communications, to increasingly interventionist online speech policies, politically contested fact-checking initiatives and a sprawling network of publicly funded NGOs shaping public debate, the instinct has too often been the same: More oversight, more regulation and less trust in free citizens.
Technology itself is not the threat. It is the concentration of technological power in the hands of governments and institutions that increasingly believe they know what is best for us. Freedom rarely disappears overnight. More often, it is surrendered one seemingly reasonable measure at a time.
