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Your response to point 2 made me gasp. Just watch a few episodes of any of the many true crime false conviction series on Netflix. Unscrupulous prosecutors are not rare, and it does not matter who you are—if you get caught in the crosshairs you could go to prison for a crime you didn’t commit, or be coerced to provide false witness against a friend or loved one for a crime they didn’t commit.

Netflix is definitely a reliable and objective source for crime data.

Fact is stranger than fiction.

I watched that series and if we were in a ubiquitous surveillance state few if any of those people would have been convicted. They would have had video/phone tracking to verify their alibi and/or video of the crime showing they didn't do it.

That's making a big assumption that everyone has equal access to surveillance data and that most if not all players are fair-mindedly searching for the truth.

If you assume the other way, pervasive surveillance makes a frame-up easier.

I live in a country where the accused has equal access to the evidence.

And your rejoinder doesn't make sense. If you were being railroaded for a crime video showing that you didn't do it cant hurt you.

In many US jurisdictions, the decision over what police body cam footage to release is left to the police themselves. For example:

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/18/body-camera-aurora-pol...

> Police Chief Nick Metz said he wants to release body camera footage from the August death of Elijah McClain to lend more transparency to the investigation. But three months later, police still have it — advised by the district attorney’s office to keep it in house.

In many US jurisdictions, the decision over what police body cam footage to release is left to the police themselves

In the UK as well, there have been several cases where the police have chosen only to disclose “relevant” evidence, when the existence of additional evidence becomes known the case collapses.

I said "the accused", not everyone. If you are charged with a crime and if that footage could be evidence then it is required that the state turn it over to the accused.

Only evidence produced in court. Body cameras can "shut off" or "break", the full footage can be destroyed, etc.

> I live in a country where the accused has equal access to the evidence.

Really? Where? Because in most countries with laws requiring that, police and prosecutors regularly ignore said laws with impunity.

For many people in the U.S., overzealous prosecutors are their allies so long as the people they are prosecuting who are "already guilty of bad shit" belong to undesirable demographics. Prosecutors and their selective enforcement efforts are central to suppressing minority votes through felony disenfranchisement, for instance in Florida.

I wonder how the arguments against surveillance capitalism poll across targeted minorities vs. the general population. I speculate that sentiments diverge in the same direction as sentiments towards the police.

I'm sure there are bad prosecutors, but Netflix is hardly a source to look into something like this. They tend to make very compelling, but obviously biased, documentaries.

But I agree with your sentiment otherwise.

As for # 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

This is a great example, though, of why most people won't care. Most people will look at that and think "Swartz hacked in to a system, stole data, and distributed it for free. Sure, the prosecution may have been harsh, but I don't go around hacking into systems."

To be clear, I don't agree with that, or any of the 5 points I put above. But I still think it's important to emphasize that 90+ percent of people will look at that and similar cases and think "that situation doesn't apply to me."

> 1. In the US, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act already prohibits this.

That only applies to genetic data. There are several ways for your insurer to find out everything wrong with you, especially when many medical practices sell your data. It does not cover any other type of insurance, other than health insurance. Genetic information can be used to discriminate in disability insurance, long-term care insurance, life insurance etc.

>I think the issue for most people in the US is that they still fundamentally believe that the justice system is generally "just", at least with respect to themselves, though that is obviously changing.

I think you highlighted a bigger core issue: people think that the past was somehow better and what they're seeing in their time is unique. The justice system isn't changing, it's been like this for at least a century, probably longer. America hasn't just elected its first rabble rousing demagogue for a president and now the country is going to shit, this has happened before. Multiple times.

This is worrisome to me because it causes emotional overreactions to situations that aren't really that unprecedented. We elected Donald Trump, and obviously we are special so we have to make sure this doesn't happen again. The punchline is that we are ignorant of the past and are unaware that the republic has carried on just fine after previously awful presidents, and without that knowledge, we may make a number of bad decisions that negatively affect the future of this country.