Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)

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R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?

D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.

If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.

R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...

D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.

R.E: Could I get some food?

D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,

"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...