I had this conversation with someone recently around ubiquitous traffic cameras to help enforce speed limits (in Washington the police seem to have basically stopped enforcing speed laws it seems and people are getting kinda crazy so we were discussing alternative options like tracking when you get on the freeway and off and calculating average speed as an option), the problem is it's easy to write the law today in a pretty acceptable way "Data can only be stored for x-hours unless speeding is detected then it's recorded as part of the record for the ticket", but the problem is once the system is deployed it's much easier for law makers to then slowly roll back those protections, and some of them aren't even that ridiculous, like tying it to amber/silver alerts, most wouldn't object there, but eventually they'll try for "we want to keep records around so we can get a list of who was driving in the area of a crime", and that'll start with a warrant but we've seen how willing prosecutors are to completely ignore violations of that.
Somewhat rant-y I know, but just kinda a cautionary around the "well we can trust the government to keep laws as initially written and not remove all the parts that are there to protect are rights".
Put such protections and limitations in the constitution and make it harder to subvert.
“The right of a citizen to use public spaces without causing the creation of a long term, indexable, searchable, hashable record of their presence shall not be curtailed.”
Side note - I’m not even an American citizen but can evoke the style of the second amendment without much trouble. That’s soft power!
(as someone who strongly believes the founding fathers would be appalled at our lack of continuing to amend the constitution) I think we're less and less likely to get more amendments passed, at least for a good while, things are just so crazily divided right now.
Somewhat rant-y I know, but just kinda a cautionary around the "well we can trust the government to keep laws as initially written and not remove all the parts that are there to protect are rights".