Selective enforcement of laws can be a huge problem. If for some reason a local cop decides he doesn’t like you, having all your crimes recorded in advance will make retaliation much easier.
Full transparency mitigates selective enforcement—if you can always point out the similar crimes other people are doing, selective enforcement becomes untenable in any semi-democratic society.
The relevant terms are “selective enforcement” and “selective prosecution”. Both are fully legal (as long as you don’t show bias against any of the protected classes) and commonly practiced.
As a trivial example try telling the traffic warden that she can’t give you a parking ticket because there is a bunch of illegally parked cars without tickets around.
This is true. If the surveillance system does not come with well-designed protections for those being watched, then problems like that can happen. Having a thorough surveillance system would make it possible to protect people from things like that, though of course that doesn’t mean it will actually happen. I’m not actually confident that increased surveillance would be a good thing; I was just arguing that “individual autonomy is good; therefore surveillance is bad,” is not a coherent argument.
Selective enforcement of laws can be a huge problem. If for some reason a local cop decides he doesn’t like you, having all your crimes recorded in advance will make retaliation much easier.
Full transparency mitigates selective enforcement—if you can always point out the similar crimes other people are doing, selective enforcement becomes untenable in any semi-democratic society.
That is empirically not true—well, unless you don’t consider the US to be a “semi-democratic society”.
We don’t have recordings of rich bankers doing cocaine. Saying “but they also do it” is very different from having the recorded proof of this fact.
The relevant terms are “selective enforcement” and “selective prosecution”. Both are fully legal (as long as you don’t show bias against any of the protected classes) and commonly practiced.
As a trivial example try telling the traffic warden that she can’t give you a parking ticket because there is a bunch of illegally parked cars without tickets around.
This is true. If the surveillance system does not come with well-designed protections for those being watched, then problems like that can happen. Having a thorough surveillance system would make it possible to protect people from things like that, though of course that doesn’t mean it will actually happen. I’m not actually confident that increased surveillance would be a good thing; I was just arguing that “individual autonomy is good; therefore surveillance is bad,” is not a coherent argument.