I think it's good to acknowledge, yes, this is worth the cost (since even if it would have opened up massive potential for this system to be abused, massive pri

I think it's good to acknowledge, yes, this is worth the cost (since even if it would have opened up massive potential for this system to be abused, massive privacy loss for law abiding citizens, etc., it's true it might have caught a few abusers). Just like how the physical world equivalent - Governments putting cameras in everybody's homes that are watched by AI and police can access at any time when something is flagged - would be far more open to abuse than they would be useful for stopping crime. We must always remember that mass surveillance is never the most effective way to stop crime, and is rarely even that useful. You make the haystack far larger and finding the needles gets more difficult, and AIs, while impressive, generate huge numbers of false positives.