However, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time.
Serious question - how can you hope to construct a law that addresses this perceived misuse without also stomping on other recognized rights? Long term, the paradigm in law is that whatever happens in the public eye is fair game, and I'm not sure you can put that genie back in the bottle without seriously impacting basic rights like freedom of speech (think photographers and the like).
I also don't understand on a moral/legal level how doing a thing suddenly becomes more wrong just because it can be done more accurately, at least beyond a vague feeling of "eww". A cop (or a set thereof) can already sit at an intersection and note every plate that passes by, legally, yet it's somehow wrong just because it became cheap to do? What?
I'd like to think we don't make laws based on vague feelings of "eww". I think the data is coming, you can't stop it, any attempts to do so would be ineffective and regressive, and we'd best get ready to live in a post-privacy society, where "privacy" in this case is defined as "the hope that nobody bothered to connect the dots you've been leaving visible the entire time".
Why do I think you're being willfully obtuse, here? What you're proposing would require nothing short of a constitutional convention, and what we end up with on the other side of that process may not actually be the America we grew up in anymore.
How does a law that limits the government ruin America? Or specifically, how does a law limiting the use of surveillance footage by police ruin America? Why would it require a constitutional amendment? I honestly don't understand your reaction.
To be clear, I am only talking about laws that limit the gov't.
Because the process I mentioned is the only feasible way to create "a law that limits the government", especially given the current legislative climate, and that process is incredibly dangerous.
Serious question - how can you hope to construct a law that addresses this perceived misuse without also stomping on other recognized rights? Long term, the paradigm in law is that whatever happens in the public eye is fair game, and I'm not sure you can put that genie back in the bottle without seriously impacting basic rights like freedom of speech (think photographers and the like).
I also don't understand on a moral/legal level how doing a thing suddenly becomes more wrong just because it can be done more accurately, at least beyond a vague feeling of "eww". A cop (or a set thereof) can already sit at an intersection and note every plate that passes by, legally, yet it's somehow wrong just because it became cheap to do? What?
I'd like to think we don't make laws based on vague feelings of "eww". I think the data is coming, you can't stop it, any attempts to do so would be ineffective and regressive, and we'd best get ready to live in a post-privacy society, where "privacy" in this case is defined as "the hope that nobody bothered to connect the dots you've been leaving visible the entire time".