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Its a difference of scale. We license people to be private investigators. They stalk around, take pictures, and otherwise spy on what they're paid to do within

Its a difference of scale. We license people to be private investigators. They stalk around, take pictures, and otherwise spy on what they're paid to do within the confines of the law and their license. It costs people-time to do this. Whereas we can blanket cameras everywhere, run facial recog, and do further analytics on the saved videos. It takes roughly 0 people-hours to operate that (setup costs time, but further requires none). And remember Cardinal Richieu's (disputed) comment "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Instead, give me a year's worth of footage..... How many felonies will you find?

imgabe 8y ago
If we find 100 felonies per person for everyone in the country, it's going to be physically impossible to prosecute that many cases and jail that many people. At some point we have to decide that it's not worth having a law that is essentially unenforceable. Maybe you could argue that they would just be selectively enforced to remove people the state finds inconvenient. We could probably fix that legislatively by requiring a law to be enforced some high X% of times that the state becomes aware of it, because what's really the point of a law if it's ignored 99% of the time? The thing is, technology doesn't just go away. Once something is invented, there's no uninventing it. So, we're going to have to figure out how to create a just world where public surveillance is ubiquitous. The idea of privacy in terms of "don't look at me" is not something we do for its own sake. It exists to serve a purpose, whether that's to prevent embarrassment or prevent tyranny. We're going to need to find other ways to serve those purposes.