[some_random]

I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests".

For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.

[kozak_]

I think this is where the conversation is from theoretic vs practical limits. Most folks don't care about government overreach until it affects them or theirs personally. And because of costs, government overreach has been theoretical versus practical. And even when practical, it's more whiteglove treatment.

First example is that most folks don't care about police checkpoints, simply because they are rare, and when they do happen they are over pretty fast. You do have some that care and think they are an infringement of rights, but they are a loud minority, and even those that do have issues with them, just bite the bullet and provide them their license and tell them where they are going.

Some things we don't care that much about is simply because they can't be abused that much. For example, majority of the population doesn't care too much that the NSA is hoovering up all traffic including encrypted traffic, because there's no way to practically decrypt it a mass scale.

But if quantum computing or some other method makes it cost effective and allows them to effectively decrypt this traffic, we would see a lot more people calling their lawmakers complaining of government overreach.

Another current example is that most people never cared about the fact that ICE or border patrol can require ID and have warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border simply because the stops weren't front page news.