> Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a sp

> Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group. That has nothing to do with police surveillance. That has everything to do with crooked cops. It's a problem that's worth talking about, but it's completely unrelated to a conversation about limiting the damage that can be done with tireless, incredibly cheap robot police officers. > ...but mass-surveillance is still happening! What I'm describing as the ideal situation isn't mass surveillance. If you declare all surveillance that gets fed back into a filing cabinet (computerized or otherwise) to be mass surveillance, you make it impossible to distinguish between a single guy on a stakeout and an organization that records and stores for the rest of eternity every single phone call in a nation, the exterior of every single piece of snail mail in a nation, and the movement of every single automobile in every major and most minor metropolitan areas in that nation. Please don't do that. > The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could? If you could get it for free, it would be nice. It's a hard problem that requires some very serious tradeoffs. There is no way around those tradeoffs. Tor -as is- is very useful. If it protected against a passive adversary that controlled most of the nodes in the network, nearly noone would use it because it would be too slow. > ...what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil? I mean, the obvious stuff? * As part of a routine crime-prevention patrol. (E.g. an officer walking a regular beat.) * As part of an ongoing investigation into one or more people who are -at a minimum- suspected of being involved in illegal activity. Let's skip the conversation about what should or shouldn't be illegal. While that's a useful conversation to have, it's not in-scope for a conversation about limiting the damage done by robot policing.