| Not saying any of these are going to happen, but some possibilities include: (To be clear, I'm just spitballing some fiction for parable use only.) 1. Police taking biological samples as a matter of course, even after the crisis. A sneaky politician or official manages to turn this in to DNA sample collection, maybe by sequencing swabs on the side to "catch criminals." Nobody stops it because everyone is focused on the virus. 2. Local governments end up with expanded power to shut down businesses, this eventually gets abused for some kind of extortion in a small town somewhere. 3. Police gain generalized "indefinite detention" powers instead of specific "court-ordered quarantine" powers in some jurisdictions, creating a ticking time bomb set to explode the first time a mayor wants to get rid of a protester. 4. Efforts to stamp out counterproductive conspiracy theories result in legal and bureaucratic infrastructure which sits around and is eventually used to suppress a very productive conspiracy theory. 5. Playing on the above, Google builds a system to delete every video that says 5G and COVID-19 are linked. This is eventually used to delete every video that suggests Darkriver Mercenaries Inc. and the scandal in Kumran are linked. All of these cases share one thing in common: a bad, over-generalized law gets passed because legislators are panicking and not taking the time to think about civil liberties. The virus spreads fast, but not so fast that you can't take the time to legislate effectively. |