Surveillance states cannot obtain reliable information because all reporting becomes politically charged

Evidence

The most fundamental reason [why despotic rulers are unable to achieve their goals] is found in the lack of reliable information. … The flaw of the system is that all acts tend to have an immediate political significance, which means that information degenerates into informing and so becomes worthless for planning purposes. Or else the information is offered that the informant believes his superiors want to hear, even if they insist on information that reflects the world as it is rather than the world as they would like it to be. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1642

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the blindness allegory: when monitoring is omnipresent it distorts what it monitors — connects to Luhmann on how observation systems corrupt the information they collect. Directly relevant to reader’s blindness-epistemology theme.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense paradox: total surveillance inverts into total ignorance, because political salience corrupts the channel of information. Bears sustained reflection on how observation itself shapes the observed.