From The Road to Serfdom:

“The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists
 disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their
democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority’s agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible.”

The best way to view the power you wish to grant to government is to imagine that power being wielded by someone who’s political viewpoints you despise.

Activist Post: Senators call on Homeland Security to release info on D.C. cell phone surveillance

ACLU: How an Irish court ruling could affect U.S. spying

Nextgov: DARPA wants to merge human and computer cyber defenders

TechCrunch: Orchid Labs is in the process of raising $125 million for its surveillance-free layer atop the internet

Axios: How Peter Thiel’s Palantir tracks American citizens

Forbes: Bad things happen when you don’t update your privacy settings

The Intercept: The War on Pot marches on: In nearly half the country, marijuana arrests have gone up since 2014

Reason: The war on opioids probably helped kill Prince

The Atlantic: Anatomy of a Silicon Valley pot deal

FEE: Is the U.S. now freer than Europe in terms of pot decriminalization?

Reason: How we lost privacy: “Where people once feared surveillance in their residences, their children now provide the cameras and microphones themselves. Home security systems offer live video streams accessible anywhere. People share their private conversations with devices such as Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. The recent subpoena of an Alexa—the artificial intelligence inside an Echo—that may have “witnessed” a homicide should give all of us pause about what our devices may be recording even when we think they’re not.

That’s the crux of the matter: Even people who resist the idea of the government having our information will willingly open the curtains to private companies—some of whom then turn what they learn over to the government, or leave it vulnerable to hackers. They have our names, our addresses, our bank details, our pictures, our email correspondence, even our current heart rate. Their geotracking knows where we are at any time.”

USA Today: Facebook fights to keep using your face

Activist Post: Police testing controversial portable DNA machine

Techdirt: The war on whistleblowers claims another casualty

BoingBoing: Government accidentally sends file on “remote mind control” methods to journalist

The American Conservative: John Bolton: In search of Carthage

DefenseOne: Pentagon is building an AI factory

Daily Beast: Fake pain pills killed Prince, along with thousands more Americans

Herb: Will psychedelics go corporate like cannabis?

National Geographic: ‘Exploding ant’ rips itself apart to protect its own