Mass facial-recognition surveillance sets a dangerous precedent because once a government builds the infrastructure to continuously identify and track its citizens, the pressure to expand its use becomes extremely difficult to reverse. Technologies introduced for terrorism or violent crime historically grow into broader systems of monitoring, and future leaders inherit those powers whether or not the original intentions were good. Facial recognition fundamentally changes public life by removing practical anonymity, allowing authorities to potentially map where people go, who they associate with, what events they attend, and what causes they support. Even small error rates can lead to wrongful identification and arrests at large scale, while the combination of AI, biometric tracking, and mass data collection creates capabilities no government in history has ever possessed before. The core issue is not whether safety matters, but whether society is willing to normalize infrastructure capable of permanent population-level monitoring. A free society depends not only on security, but on limits to centralized power, and once mass surveillance becomes standard, those limits become much harder to preserve.