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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

"the power to deploy these technologies at scale will only be deployed to fight serious crime"

[proceeds to use dragnet to crack down on people dumping stuff in the woods]

Dumping stuff in the woods can be a serious crime. Sometimes you are cycling through an idyllic remote area and you find someone has dumped a lot of asbestos there right there on the trail.

Even if it’s not a seriously dangerous substance, making the landscape ugly like that is still a really shitty thing to do to your fellow citizens. I think it would be great if more dumping violations could be prosecuted.

There is no surveillance of actual people, the government just found a cheap way to find out that their own land had an unexpected change. Finding suspects seems to be old fashioned police work. I find it very hard to find any arguments against this use of the data

What's the downside to pervasively prosecuting illegal dumping?

The same as the downsides to using dragnets to prevent any other petty crime.

Littering is a petty crime.

Illegal dumping is scum of the earth stuff.

It opens the doors for going after even smaller crimes. Imagine if all CCTVs in London where online and they used them to purge all the homeless out of the city or jail them. Does that sound like a great idea to you? The law is often flawed and "micromanaging" people can be destructive for society.

So no considering the crime when deciding how to direct resources? Only pursue investigations of some murders?

(murder is the extreme example, but that's the argument you've just made, that devoting resources to prosecuting some particular crime is a slippery slope to abusing the homeless)

This tech isn't going to be able to catch people dumping stuff in the woods unless they're doing it on an industrial scale in their own woods to avoid a few million quid in landfill tax.

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