"And I got to thinking: what if you built a whole country this way? Around this. Around these devices, these possibilities. If we just decided that privacy on that level wasn’t as important—a lot of the U.S. guys do feel that way, they have this weird anti-statist freedom thing that somehow creates a superstate in private hands and they don’t see the issue because it’s not guvmint. But that was what I wondered: what if it was? What if surveillance was the government? What would that nation feel like? Would it work? For most people, for most of the time, it would probably be great. But it would have a capacity for monstrousness. And there’d be, inevitably, these opaque places where something could go so very wrong. A real nightmare...And it went from there. What if we made a world around that?"