Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).
This is already a daily reality for certain minorities in some countries already.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...
Once you go full family execution, that's pretty much the limit of escalation against an individual. If you're willing and able to destroy everything and everyone I care about, there is no longer any bound you can control on what I might be willing to do to prevent that, or avenge it, and you are now relying entirely on my own ethical reticence and my resource limitations to avoid me engaging in acts of terrorism against your nation-state and its loyalists.
And that's the practical argument for proportional punishments, if your government is so dysfunctional that there is no moral argument for them. If you lock up all the Uighurs just for existing, for example, you may find that the ones who escape your pogrom are more willing to fight, and to fight dirty.
Realistically, we should probably be talking about vandalism of surveillance equipment in terms of how many cameras or camera-equivalents you could be compelled by force to replace whenever you are caught destroying one. And that is balanced by how likely you are to be caught when destroying one. Which depends somewhat on how many cameras/snitches in the area are fully operational.
There's probably an optimal camera-destroying algorithm to be discovered in there somewhere.
> you may find that the ones who
> your pogrom are more willing to
> fight, and to fight dirty.
This stuff is frequently by design.
Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of random people - just like purges in the many repressive regimes around the world. The main win for repression here is they no longer need a system like, say, East Germany where 25% of population spied on their neighbors.
I suppose you might count it a win that in this coming future, your car isn't going to start when you act staggering drunk rather than when you objectively are staggering drunk. But I can't see the win here.
But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong!. Come on.
Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install them) let me tell you something: the cameras are shit, the quality they produce is shit, clients are cheap as fuck and don't want to repair them, they break constantly, the software is terrible to use... I could go on.
We are a very long way away from the dystopia you are describing. People will gladly unintentionally fuck this up long before it becomes what you're fearing it will be.
With cars, the idea of a 0.1% chance of dying each time you step into a vehicle is terrifying - that's much higher than you get now, humans are actually amazingly good at driving. IE, fortunately, the system probably won't stomach the costs of bad self-driving cars.
But with the justice system spotting potential criminals, yeah, pulling in some innocents isn't going to bother a system with N degrees of repression. Most people in the justice system have no choice but to plea bargain now. Most people in the justice system are also guilty but the innocent-but-not-wealthy minority is generally SOL. And that is in our ostensible democracy, that's known by most sophisticated observers of the system, and only handful make an effort to change it. So a half-assed evidence gatherer of whatever sort will make lots of people happy, put lot of guilty and innocent people in jail and hardly needs great reliability. Indeed, with AI parole-granting systems, we're already there.
You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.
Believe me, I wish it was that easy.
Jammers are trackable, but if you use them judiciously, I think they could be used to cover other attacks: activate jammer, attack camera infrastructure, deactivate jammer, and flee.