Privacy will be the hot topic of this decade, if not century. Now, when violent crime is at a historical low, is not the time to give law enforcement new and invasive capabilities.
I'd happily settle for a situation where national intelligence agencies try to collect everything they can about everybody. But it's not just that, it's dozens of government agencies at various levels and with various levels of competence, plus hundreds of private actors who have some way of tracking something about you.
NSA shmaNSA - I'm much more concerned about the traffic cams in my city, installed by I-get-paid-by-the-hour consultants or barely competent public servants, who are supposed to follow all the so-called 'laws' and 'procedures' when it comes to storage time frames, access control etc.; let alone the fact that we're being watched 24/7 by itself. In 5 years time, HD cams will be so cheap that it becomes feasible for a private party to plaster a whole city with them (and many parties will do this). Slap on some facial recognition, boom we have untrackable private parties keeping logs of where every single person walks in all public spaces. And hey, storage space is cheap, let's keep all that data.
That is the real, practically relevant threat, not a government agency stepping out of its bounds. And the scary thing is that there is no realistic way to avoid that situation. Some legislation can keep it at bay for a decade maybe, but long term - we'll have to adapt to the fact that 'privacy' as it existed in the past is gone.
And that power has to raise aside from the governments agencies. I know it might affect startups too, but the people who have gathered data until now haven't stuck to enough ethics. The danger that data collection represents is proportional to the square of the size of the db, or of the compatible systems the data can be bound to.
Right, it's gonna be the theme of the decade.
More importantly, wait until these HD cams and other video cameras are hacked so that someone else besides the consultants, government, and myriad other actors has complete control. Straight out of a dystopia trope.
Besides states, there is a growing number of companies that engage in surveillance - search engines, social sites, defense contractors, companies supplying MPAA IP addresses to sue, etc.
We are in a world where there are many parties doing surveillance. The cat is really out of the bag.
NSA can just say: ok, suppose we stop surveillance - then we can't defend you against other countries doing surveillance on us. It's an arms race and it doesn't matter who started it.
France is a Euro area country, and only withdraws notes after they are too dirty or damaged to be usable, in line with ECB policy.
> If you take cash from an ATM and use it to pay a criminal [...] the number will be traced.
I very much doubt this.
"If you want privacy, you need laws to prevent data collection and use"
No. You need to create a situation where it's exceedingly hard to track things you want privacy about. 'Laws' can't stop a societal tidal wave.
"and you need that law to come from an alternative power from governments."
Then it's not a law, is it? I'm not even sure what direction you're thinking in, what sort of power could enforce something like that? Are you saying the checks and balances in the trias politica aren't strong enough?
... in the First World.