Marco Rubio’s been trying to keep a low profile on his way to becoming the establishment “anyone but Trump” pick for the Republican nomination. He made every effort to walk political tightropes on issues ranging from his tax plan to whether he supports a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

But if Rubio was trying to walk the same kind of tightrope with respect to how he would handle counterterrorism efforts as president, he just fell and fell far. Asked whether he agreed with Donald Trump that we need to close down mosques associated with people deemed to be terrorist threats, Rubio had this to say:

It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down anyplace — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — anyplace where radicals are being inspired. The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are, because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor, in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities. So whatever facility is being used — it’s not just a mosque — any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at.

There’s a lot going on here, but obviously the most glaring problem with Rubio’s comment is that he just endorsed a program of mass surveillance that would be wholly unprecedented in a Western democracy. In order to identify every terror threat, shutting down any place that the government considers to be a place “where radicals are being inspired” the very concept of privacy would have to go out the window. For everyone, but probably for Muslims to a greater extent.

What’s more, closing down businesses, organizations and social networks associated with radicalization runs up against the same problem that closing down mosques does: Unless you’re willing to keep people from freely associating everywhere, closing specific avenues of communication will only lead to new ones opening up.

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, you can read Rubio generously here and take his comments to mean that we should move the discussion away from Islam and back to national security policy more generally. I don’t think the context in which the question was asked merits such a generous reading — he was asked about surveillance of Muslims in particular, and he didn’t take the opportunity to allude to the fact that the majority of terrorist attacks in the United States are carried out by white Christian men. However, even if you grant Rubio your generosity and assume that he would expand the surveillance state without regard to religion, he’s still calling for an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state!

There’s simply no good way to spin this. Either Rubio is for a massive restriction of civil liberties for Muslims, or he’s for a massive restriction of civil liberties for everyone. In both cases, the sheer logistical lift required to monitor and shut down any and every establishment or organization that may or may not be planning to do anyone harm is staggering.

Recently, a man in Ohio was arrested for allegedly inciting terrorist violence online. The chief evidence against him? He had reblogged some gifs on Tumblr and retweeted some memes on Twitter. The federal government, in cooperation with both of these social media platforms, tracked his IP address and — after shutting down his accounts no less than eight times — raided his home and arrested him. There was no evidence that he was plotting a specific attack; all the government has are posts on social media expressing support for and sympathy with Islamic State militants. As The Verge wrote regarding his case:

It’s unclear whether simply reblogging the GIF qualifies as a solicitation to crime, and the court will have to grapple with that issue as the case proceeds. McNeil’s case is also notable for being almost entirely based on online activity. The affidavit justifying his arrest lists more than 50 different posts from his various Tumblr and Twitter accounts, but only minimal physical surveillance of McNeil, detailing his morning commute and various bank accounts linked to his name. As it stands currently, the case rests entirely on McNeil’s online persona, and whether it can be seen as inciting tangible violence elsewhere in the world.

This sort of surveillance and enforcement in the context of counterterrorism efforts is already enough to make the average American uncomfortable. We generally understand that retweets are not necessarily endorsements, and that even if they are, we have the right to say what we want unless we pose a credible and specific threat to others. Under the kinds of surveillance and policing programs proposed in the last few days — first by Trump and now by Rubio — these kinds of arrests would be the norm, not the exception. They would turn the United States into even more of a police state.

And a government that has the power to police members of a specific group to such a great extent has the power to police others to the same degree.