We’ve never had a central data store that would make it practical to achieve such a feat. Now we have one that could answer questions like this, forever.
Mass surveillance at scale is not a trivial problem to solve, but Flock is both making it happen and making it clear that they are fine with enabling bad actors to take advantage of it.
While I don't love the FBI's history of data collection, there is a world of difference between warehousing data from government records, and building a graph of warehoused data from all possible sources and selling access to any small town police chief that can convince the city council to pay for it.
Plus, data in FBI custody is nominally subject to laws and oversight in a way that privately held data is not.
If you think democracy still has a chance in a nation as diverse and expansive as the united states, given that technology empowers despots and poisons democracies that are too big to be held by social bonds, then you are much more optimistic than I am.
At this point, the only way to preserve democracy would be to mostly dissolve the federal system, leaving states as democracies without the heavy hand and massive financial leverage from above.
States are closer to the right size for democracy to be resistant, but I think we’d need city-states of the metropolises, and big states like California would possibly need to subdivide.
Many trans people have already had their passports revoked, for some there is no path to obtaining one again, and it is deeply unsettling to me.