[miki123211]

The problem with the government is that the internet breaks assumptions that the government really doesn't want to break.

Let's take court cases as an example. Imagine your jurisdiction always let people look up cases that they had a case number for, but didn't let them search for all cases involving a specific person to protect the innocent. This worked fine when looking up a case involved taking a trip to the court, scheduling an appointment, giving the case number to an employee and waiting the for the documents to be brought into the reading room.

Then, somebody got the bright idea to move all that to the internet, making life easier for both the people who needed access to cases and the employees who used to provide it. There's one problem, however, a computer system won't stop an unsavory company from the Maldives from querying all the case numbers and building an index of all the cases and their participants, letting people search for all cases involving a specific person, something which the government specifically wanted to avoid. Captchas are the only real way to stop this.

[dns_snek]

Captchas don't stop this, they only add a minor hurdle that any "unsavory company" looking to sell this data will bypass with ease.