There's also the problem of Dumb Laws. We pay legislators to legislate for us; is it any surprise when in addition to doing the necessary fine tuning on the wheels of justice they also dick around and do make-work in an attempt to justify their jobs at the next election?

Dumb/unenforced laws aren't a problem in a society with merely human enforcers, until someone tries to enforce them. But if we switch to automated enforcement there is a horrible danger that we'll end up with a system in which everybody is a criminal. Per ex: can you swear to me that you haven't broken any laws in the past month? (Like, say, driven at 33 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone? Copied an mp3 without the permission of the copyright holder? Misrepresented the actual book value of a stolen asset in an insurance claim? And so on.)

And automated enforcement is what automated surveillance leads to. Not the police state, but the robot state.

Charlie,

I disagree and I agree.

Although they'd be false leads, both of your examples would raise valid suspicions. It's not much different -- conceptually speaking -- than if a cop walked into a neighborhood, saw some disturbing graffiti and then checked out everyone who lived there. They can't arrest you for living near the graffiti, but it's a first step in an investigation.

The problem is that we're talking about virtual cops watching your every move, reading all your graffiti (and there's a lot more of it nowadays), and then building a long dossier. They have an effectiveness that human cops could never deliver. So, the activity isn't much different, and yet the level of intrusion is greater.

As for Ted Kennedy, I would think that incident was arranged ahead of time. Back when we were debating the Clinton health care plan and comparing our system to Canada's, one of the opponents' talking points was that Canada had a waiting list for MRI machines. Some Democrat arranged to "need" an MRI scan, so he flew all the way to Hawaii where they (naturally) had a waiting list.