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If you acknowledge that police regularly fail to act on crimes even with positive ID, why on earth would you allow a private company to collect all that informa
by NietzscheanNull 11d ago
If you acknowledge that police regularly fail to act on crimes even with positive ID, why on earth would you allow a private company to collect all that information just for them to ignore/misuse? How is dragnet surveillance a fix for inept/corrupt policing?
Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.
This showed up at the top of HN for me today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713395
Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.