Good time for a reminder that the surveillance state isn't going to come in because anyone has bad intentions. It happens because the technology is dirt cheap and will undoubtedly reduce crime.
The risk is that as the government gains more control it will go rogue and do real damage. Racial, religious and nationalist panics happen from time to time; sooner or later there will be perfect records of who is going to what Church/Mosque/Synagogue/etc that are going to cause a lot of harm.
The debate is going to centre around intentions and the fact that capability is the problem will be ignored. As is customary on issues where it hasn't killed millions of people in this century in this country and the people last century or different countries are different because ... well, something must have changed otherwise all this surveillance would be a concern.
I disagree because intentions and capabilities both play a part, often to different degrees from different parties, and duplicity in both are often hidden, and therefore saying it's just because tech is cheap is a very superficial analysis of the issue at hand. To me that just seems like an easily planned plausible deniability strategy by those involved. Of course hyperfocusing on one isn't the right way, but neither is going the other directional extreme.
One of the biggest problems with issues like this is that there would be a mixture of logical methods used to draw conclusions and lots of people forget the difference between inductive and deductive logic. (Intentions being more inductive and capabilities being more deductive)
Intentions (potentially malicious, etc) matter and play a big part, but are harder to prove. I reject the idea that the deployment of surveillance tech is simply because certain leaders just are convinced it's cheap. Any kind of large city like San Diego has all kinds of military industrial complex actors pushing it in directions for all kinds of obvious reasons that are commonly connected to surveillance.
tldr; In general, increases in surveillance are almost always about control, and not protection.
The risk is that as the government gains more control it will go rogue and do real damage. Racial, religious and nationalist panics happen from time to time; sooner or later there will be perfect records of who is going to what Church/Mosque/Synagogue/etc that are going to cause a lot of harm.
The debate is going to centre around intentions and the fact that capability is the problem will be ignored. As is customary on issues where it hasn't killed millions of people in this century in this country and the people last century or different countries are different because ... well, something must have changed otherwise all this surveillance would be a concern.