[dmantis]

Because law enforcement must be costly and non-automated to avoid the unbalanced power distribution between an individual and the gov, which only serves the individual and not rules them.

A cost to catch a criminal should be a manual and expensive work from an agent and thus provide no ability to mass abuse human rights on scale. Only on actual criminals when needed.

[zo1]

> "A cost to catch a criminal should be a manual and expensive work from an agent and thus provide no ability to mass abuse human rights on scale. Only on actual criminals when needed."

The problem is that we're expending huge amounts of engineering power to avoid the issue when we could instead be using it to provide a privacy-first option that still safely enables law enforcement efforts to track down violent people whilst not enabling this hypothetical power-inbalance of government over individuals.

Let's be honest though, it's a hypothetical boogeyman. The real problem is that we all secretly know that we don't live in a rainbow world where we all agree on what is "right". We can't even agree on supposedly simple concepts like protecting children's bodily autonomy and safety, so who's to say we will ever be able to agree on any other political issue which arguably pales in comparison.

[skybrian]

This is something often implied but rarely stated, so thanks for spelling it out.

But I don’t think it’s an inherent tradeoff? In theory, anyway, the police work for us. They’re spending taxpayer money. It’s expensive. If there’s a way of making them more efficient then we should want them to use it. Maybe there are ways?

This doesn’t mean skimping on necessary safeguards, but that doesn’t mean we need to put up unnecessary obstacles about knowing where to look. We should still want them to win at finding criminals and we don’t want “game balance” because it’s not a game.

Catching the bad guys and not prosecuting the wrong people both involve having more accurate information. Bad information means more mistakes.

It doesn’t mean just trusting them. Defense attorneys, judges, and juries benefit from better information, too.