Yeah, the blacklist approach to legislation is much preferable to the whitelist approach, at least in terms of human rights and societal evolution.
Security always involves trade-offs. Unthinkingly choosing the most restrictive policy every time is not a good security practice.
There are absolutely times where security has to be compromised, even abandoned, in the name of usability, and times where security must be ironclad, even user-hostile. Civil rights law is definitely the former.