This comes from a post by a blogger named IOZ by way of Glenn Greenwald.
I fear a surveillance society not because I think that the government will actually catch me in my subversion, but because I fear that it will think that it's caught me in my subversion. The pressure to "produce results" leads to the issuance of too many traffic tickets. Imagine what it will do when someone has to justify spending a bajillion dollars on some kind of algorithmic AI that's supposed to psychohistorically predict when a new 9/11 will change everything all over again forever.
pogge, even before I clicked through to Greenwald, I was thinking "the banality of ..." (Arendt), so I wasn't surprised at his title. The metaphor of the traffic cop is perfect, if far too low-tech and still reality-based.
That it should be the unthinking functionaries who carry out the atrocities without knowing what they are doing -- that is intended, in both Orwell and Arendt (who was analysing the Nazis). That's feature, not a bug, as you always say.
Somewhere in the archives of Hullabaloo, there's a chilling post that documents how the interrogations at Camp X-Ray in the early days were run by the numbers. It didn't matter if the intelligence produced was accurate. It mattered that there was a sufficient volume of testimony to satisfy the bureaucrats back home. As if they had to introduce "aggressive interrogation techniques" to meet their quotas.