alt Hacker NewsThat's easy. Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.
That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police more tools to stop bad guys), while the case against them is a lot more subtle (human freedom, government abuse, expectations of privacy, risk of data breaches, etc).
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> Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.
It's a good steelman/devil's advocate of their position, but I wonder if proponents realize how much wishful thinking drives those supposed outcomes.
I don’t mean that I can’t imagine a scenario in which an imagined world has cameras covering every square inch, a 911 operator with their fingers hovering over the keyboard and ready to enter a license plate into the InstaLocate system, which then automatically triggers SWAT to be quick-released from a drone directly onto the current location of what is still called a “getaway car”, rather than “evidence.” But I can also imagine a situation with less steps wherein a spoon takes down an F-16, but I equally haven’t heard an argument for using spoons as air defense. ;)
Helping to solve a crime after the fact is certainly a thing, and that discussion has merit, but I think you’re taking creative license again with stopping a serial killer or spree killer “before they kill again.” That’s not really how murders play out, which is why there are special names for them.
It would be helpful for discourse, and for making your own argument, if the discussion was grounded in the reality of the sour world we live in now.