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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

It's a common dialectic pattern in law enforcement circles world-wide that data at rest that is never touched is data that doesn't exist.

That angle is based on the idea that this data "may as well not exist" but it ignores the many issues with indiscriminate data collection: the data might leak, or management might change and invent undesirable "new" purposes for old data - which, within this theory, then begins to exist retroactively.

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Or, rather, the automated systems that store and process the data will increasingly do analysis as well, with humans only viewing the data when prompted to by the system. Technically "the police" can be said not to access the data. In reality it's even worse than if they did, because the automated system , if it works as intended, is much more efficient than humans.

IOW: If it's a violation of civil rights for humans to process some data, then leaving that job to software is just automating civil rights violations.

Right, but I think that's already the next step: the theory of "we're not looking so we don't collect" predates efficient automated large-scale analysis.

It makes sense to me to fight both schemes, but they have different impact, different risk and might need different approaches.

It seems to me law enforcement talks about data collection and analysis as if automated tools didn't have privacy impacts. They often seem to deliberately focus on whether or not a human has access to some specific information, which IMO obfuscates the issue. They're not very willing to acknowledge that there are two schemes, as you call them.

> within this theory, then begins to exist retroactively.

That is evidently what they keep the data for. They want to be able to have the data to access it eventually. If they didn't want to access it eventually, they wouldn't keep it. That is why mass collections, that are stored, are wrong.

I could get behind this idea as a privacy compromise.

The government can collect any data it likes on everything, but any data it then looks at must be published to the world. Ie. The government gets no privacy when looking through its big database.

The simplest approach would be to livestream every screen owned by any government agency.

That's a far worse privacy violation for those being filmed?

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