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That question is one of the pit falls we have to avoid to preserve any chance of avoiding a police surveillance state. "What would you allow if you were maximally emotionally impacted by a crime" is basically a blank check for 100% surveillance because inevitably any restriction on methods will eventually allow some crime to go unsolved.



Exactly this. At worst, you need to at least taper the emotionally charged question with the counter-point; "Would you feel differently if your child was falsely accused of murder because of genetic comtamination?"


Yep, to see how badly things can go when 'scientific' evidence goes unquestioned look at the mess that is stuff like bite pattern analysis which gets presented as scientific but has really bad actual statistics.

Justice can't just be about catching people it has to also weigh the cost of false positives and the effect that the methods have on society.

It's a constant issue with things like TOR, encryption, and alt currencies like BTC. They can do a lot of good for repressed people but they're also inevitably going to be used by people most people would agree are awful people to protect themselves from justice. If you're developing those tools you have to be ok with that just like we have to decide as a people where we're ok with the balance between preventing crime/catching criminals and personal liberty and privacy.




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