I agree with a sibling poster that it's not necessarily about wealth. I think it's about power.
Those who attain power are corrupted enough to seek to hold on to it; and spying on those you govern is one of the ways to hold on to that power. “What are they up to? Scheming? Against me?”
It's ironic because if politicians do a good job, and don't have much to hide, we'll trust them more and re-elect them.
>I agree with a sibling poster that it's not necessarily about wealth. I think it's about power.
You can't have wealth without power, because then I can come over and take your wealth from you. Power through violence (monopolized by the state), is what guarantees your rights to your wealth.
The wider the wealth inequality increases, the wider the gap between the haves and the have-nots becomes, the more threatened the wealthy feel and so the more draconical surveillance and speech law enforcement crackdowns becomes on the masses. See modern day UK, EU, etc.
In my EU country the government increased the budget and drill training frequency for riot police this year even if they've been no major events to necessitate that. They know what's coming, since more and more people are poorer from government actions, and they're preparing already to crack down on what's to come. I assume Pegasus and other such spyware to spy on us to prevent descent, is part of that budget too.
> You can't have wealth without power, because then I can come over and take your wealth from you.
So power beats wealth. Easy to see these days with today’s wealthiest people on the planet cowering and paying tributes to Trump.
Also, power is convertible into wealth, as countless politicians have proven, while wealth is not necessarily convertible into power (like Bloomberg’s failed presidential bid has shown).
In conclusion - it’s about power, specifically political power, and the individuals yielding it: the politicians.
I don’t doubt this is the case in modern times but I doubt they have spied on the poor since the beginning of time since there was little reason to spy on powerless illiterates. They spied on known enemies or rivals sure but not on the masses since there was little reason to do so. It was also costly to do so.
Maybe not "spying" per se, but oppressors have always kept enough tabs on the oppressed to keep them oppressed for as long as possible, often without the oppressed knowing exactly how. Maybe "spying" after all.
I think it helped that things were more tribal back then. Enemies could sack and pillage if opportunity presented itself. That presented peasants/commoners/etc. a disincentive to defect. It's not like an outsider would be friendly to a defector in most cases. This provided a bond to the local warlord/chieftain/etc. Essentially it was a fear-factor to not defect because things would be worse. Plus, these people had few possessions. They basically only had their labor and the clothes on their backs. They had very little power. A population that had tenuous leadership would soon be easy pickings for a neighboring rival to swoop in and potentially make things worse.
