You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers.
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About Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkaway was a contemporary British novelist and commentator. Nicholas Cornwell, better known by his pen name Nick Harkaway, is a British novelist and commentator. As Harkaway, he is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, Gnomon, Titanium Noir, and Karla's Choice; and a non-fiction study of the digital world, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. Read more on Wikipedia →