So to put the overall point first: democracy and freedom can require putting some money and effort into protecting rights, preventing abuse, preventing dragnets, and honestly addressing second/third/nth order effects that people are worried about, etc, even if you're trying to improve something. In this particular case, it's REALLY not difficult to envision systems that would achieve a better balance for the "officially stated case" [0] you describe, and thus be more likely to win the public's approval. We could use the same basic from-the-founding historical check of requiring a warrant and specifics for a search for example, and update that for modern times. The US judiciary could establish a solid internal PKI system and every judge could have an HSM of their own, then we could have a system where all footage, search capabilities and so on were encrypted and it literally required a judge's cryptographic signature on a warrant that had enforceable technical boundaries in time and space, with everything immutably documented. That wouldn't prevent the occasional bad judge and bad warrant, but just as with traditional searches it'd be a strong low pass filter and change incentives and accountability significantly.

So you have presented (amongst other things) a very black & white false dichotomy. You're claiming a bad, prone to abuse system is the only possible way to respond to your stated threat scenario. But it's just not. And you do actually need to win the public's approval not just browbeat them.

Moving on:

>It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home

It's notable how you didn't say "trying to catch someone who had gay sex" (a felony in some states until 22 years ago), "trying to catch someone who had an abortion" (back as a felony all of a sudden), "trying to catch someone brought as a child to the US who is in the green card process", "trying to catch someone who had a state reported stolen because the car dealership reported the car missing 6 months ago but it was found 2 months ago but the databases were never designed to get real time updates so there's a lag" and so on and so forth. Or more straight forwardly "it's like if you're a cop trying to catch your ex-girlfriend who said mean things about you on social media". You're on HN, you've been part of plenty of this, I don't think it's good faith discussion on your part to reach for an emotional tug and a lot of people here recognize and resent the technique.

And again see the first thing: in this case, why could the police not get a proper narrowly tailored warrant? They have plenty of clear, straight forward probable cause do they not?

>So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone [...] You're now at a dead end.

Wait, you said you were following the car? Police can do that you know, without massively networked surveillance nets, they have cars too, and they can follow cars. They can also put out an alert to keep an eye out. You'll need to quantify the gain here vs the cost.

>So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.

I truly don't think you're making a good faith effort to see anyone's point at all.

----

0: I'm using scarequotes there and giving it a footnote because I also want to emphasize that part of our suspicion is that, precisely because of obvious improvements, the "stop the robber!!", like "think of the children1!!!!", is primarily a cover story for far... less popular things that elite powers want to do to us. Meaningful checks and balances are possible, implementation importance aside that they haven't even bothered to try from the start tells a story of absence all by itself.