My views on "surveillance" have evolved over the years. I'm in favor of local, private, surveillance of private property. I'm not in favor of aggregating that

My views on "surveillance" have evolved over the years. I'm in favor of local, private, surveillance of private property. I'm not in favor of aggregating that surveillance in a way that allows warrantless search by government officials. Nowadays we have to define what we mean by warrantless search. In this context, I specifically mean any system or human associated with a government having access to the footage in any way prior to obtaining a warrant. This includes indexing the footage into a database accessible by law enforcement without a physical transfer of property. When it comes to my property, I have surveillance. It's all offline. It goes to a set of HDDs with redundant onsite backups. The system can survive a power outage for a _long_ time on battery backups, all the cameras are PoE and the storage device and wifi network for accessing the footage are all on a dedicated backup power circuit. If something happens on my property, I have recordings of it. Those recordings exist to protect my family and our assets. Proving my innocence, or helping us find and recover my kids, if we ever have "one bad day." I choose what to do with those recordings. The recordings self destruct on a timer. And it's not accessible without a warrant. You have to go through me to get them. This is in contrast to the form of surveillance I'm not in favor of, which appears to have been normalized over my lifetime in the U.S. The U.S. scoops up a huge amount of surveillance data into databases, and then focuses the conversation on whether or not those databases can be queried without a warrant. It's a mind bending situation where our government has managed to reclassify "search" as querying a database, claiming the search didn't happen when the information was indexed into the database. The physical analogue, for me, is a government official coming into your home once a day. They take a complete inventory of all of your property. They put that inventory into a folder, and then place the folder in a filing cabinet promising not to look at it unless they suspect its relevant to a crime. Then they claim that the search doesn't happen until the look in the filing cabinet. No good sir, the search happened when you aggregated the inventory of my home. There is a nuance here that this analogue uses _content_ and not _metadata_ - but I'd posit that for many privacy advocates that nuance isn't a meaningful distinction.