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The Dutch police issued 9.2 million traffic fines on a population of 17 million. Most of this is a fully automated system from connected speed traps, to an 'invoicing system'.

I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.

Last week a judge ruled that the Student Loan administration can use mandatory personal RFID equipped train tickets to detect scholarship fraud.

A mechanism no-one but the strongest privacy advocates had imagined would be used in this way.

>I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.

You don't even need the law itself. If you've got the infrastructure to fine everyone who exceeds the speed limit in a place that it's not a big stretch to use dynamic speed limits set to the 90th percentile speed with only a little bit of lag.

Or just force cars to only be able to drive the speed limit. I don't like this option, but I feel like it's better than turning citizens into rolling ATMs.

Eventually, law enforcement will become dependent upon the speeding revenue, but the people will wise up and slow down to avoid the fines. Then how are they going to replace the lost revenue? Especially if it is "needed" because of onerous contract termination agreements agreed to.

  > If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the
  > country at least would have a record.

That idea seems deeply troubling if you're a White American. Meanwhile, this is the daily reality of Black Americans, because the police have been systematically enforcing these laws against people of colour.

Now we face a world where that same disproportionate enforcement may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).

Source?

> may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).

That doesn't make any sense! To affect elections, you'd need a really huge number of prisoners. Moreover, you'd need to deny prisoners the right to vote. Wait ...

Blacks and Latinos are already overwhelming Democrats... And the overzealous law enforcement is usually at the hands of Republicans.

Not sure why you feel the need to throw political affiliation into the conversation.

Consider a hypothetical police officer who is against "leftists" (the police officer's definition is all that matters, not ours).

Right now, said police officer can and does enforce laws disproportionally against Black Americans because to the police officer, they're all leftists.

But if we give the police officer access to all sorts of profiling information about humans, when making a traffic stop, the police officer can be extra-zealous about performing a search if the person is profiled as being a "leftist."

The point is, prosecuting people for their political views has existed for some time, but it didn't scale well. Now it will scale extremely well, up to the point of wearing glasses and tagging people with certain social profiles in real time.

Not only surveillance, but the accountability has gone up too. Not only is it easy to be exposed performing morally debatable but illegal stuff but they are also permanently recorded by unknowable number of entities(news sites/blogs), shared across innumerable platforms and get judged by mobs you never knew existed, leading to a possibly life altering effect.

Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population. Now that they could be automatically used against anyone the ruling population which was not supposed to be affected is starting to question those laws. It is OK when mostly blacks, youngsters and poor people get jailed for jaywalking; not so much when upper middle class people are.

That's what a cynical person like me can take from your argument.

I don't think that's a road we really want to go down. Laws exist to solve problems, not persecute minority groups.

I have heard white supremacists use this logic to say that DUI laws unfairly target white people, because in major cities maybe white people have cars and the minority populations use public transportation. You could also use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people.

Not really true. Many laws still on the books in southern states were created _explicitly_ to persecute minority groups.

You couldn't use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people because there isn't evidence that enforcement of insider trading is uneven, whereas there is evidence that enforcement (and sentencing) for loitering, jaywalking, and drug laws are biased against minority groups

That's a good point. I should have been more clear. When i said "that's a road you don't want to go down", I don't mean to say no laws have been created that don't have racial bias. That's definitely a problem, especially in the South.

But I have a problem with arkh's assertion that... >> Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population.

And you have the opposite thing with the war on drugs: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

> "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Were that the case, there's unlikely to be the resources to act on every crime. However, having some 'dirt' on everyone means that it'd be easy to take action on any particular 'problem' person.

>An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.

If everyone has a record, no one has a record.

Really? If everyone has a record then they can be detained whenever the authorities feel like it.

Do governments who use this kind of 'selective justice' really need the pretext of an actual law being broken?

I think what carlmr is saying is quite relevant to more democratic countries.

Even the most dictatorial countries operate on the basis that they need the consent of the governed.

> Do governments who use this kind of 'selective justice' really need the pretext of an actual law being broken?

At least one former UK Home Secretary has said that it's a good thing to have laws that aren't usually enforced, as it gives the authorities something to use when they do want to go after someone.

So (for at least one country) the answer is "yes".

Yes. Any government can fall if there's sufficient public outrage[1]. And government employees of basically any government can make use of this. I remember driving with an off duty US police officer once and him pointing out which issue of code every car on the road was in violation of so that he could legally conduct a stop if he wanted to.

[1] AI and robotics might change this later.

Look up 'mortgage headshot'. It's a type of fraud that is very common, but that is only prosecuted when it's necessary to compel a person to work with law enforcement.

>If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.

That is the nightmare scenario: when 51% of a population decides they want to lock up the other 49% and technology makes that possible.

More like 0.01% decide to lock up 100% of their political opponents supporters.

The War on Drugs was started by Nixon to target hippies and blacks, those who supported his opponents. I can imagine a War on X being brewed up by either side to do the same if they have the means to automatically enforce it.

Having recently read a lot more literature about the big picture social issues in the US from the 30 through the 70s the late '60s and early '70s was a time of stupid groups reacting to other stupid groups with tragic consequences.

The militant leftists and their bombs, the hippies and their antiwar stuff, the racists, the FBI/government and it's BS, the black power groups and their violence, they all were reacting to each other while failing to understand in any meaningful way the grievances of the other groups in any meaningful way.

Cracking down on the millitant left was right. They were the second the most destructive domestic terrorist movement (the post civl war KKK is 1st by a mile). The government at the time used it as an excuse to cast way to wide of a net because of personal beliefs (in aggregate) and because they didn't understand the where the problem was coming from. It's unfortunate.

If people hadn't been such idiots in the late 1960s there wouldn't have been a millitant left to crack down on. If civil rights of the late 1960s or the Vietnam war had happened a decade apart from each other we probably wouldn't be mopping it up in 2017. It didn't so here we are trying to wind down the war on drugs and demilitarize the police (and we'll probably revert some gun control too since it's part of the same anti-minority, anti-hippy package of knee jerk decisions).

In the 2040s we'll probably be in the same situation trying to wind down the post 9/11 expansion of government surveillance.

No, the War on drugs was specifically racially and politically motivated to help Nixon and his party. I don't have it at the moment, but there are tapes of Nixon and one if his advisors talking about this openly.

The guy who ran the beta version of the DEA at the time specifically used "marijuana" instead of the more common "cannabis," because he hated Mexicans and wanted to make people associate pot with an unpopular minority.

One reference is upthread:

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

Ahh but that we can actually call "wrong" the former is "democracy".

I'm pretty sure Nixon was elected in a democracy.