So this is something like planting a microphone into your house so they can hear your conversations (with a warrant)? That doesn't really sound too bad, it's targeted and you have to go through the proper channels to get authorization.
Something you'll find prevalent with some dissidents today. Many of them return "willingly" when presented with the alternatives.
The best return on investment in surveillance is always, always, always extortion. The spooks like to extort by threatening to reveal crimes, or prosecute them. Ever heard of plea bargaining? Most often the promise of "reduced" charges is exchanged for participating in surveillance, yielding more victims and more pigeons. Spies like to get other kinds of cooperation, for other kinds of threats--including revealing that you already caved once. Some people have enemies who would act on revelations. Most people have relatives who wouldn't want them harmed. Judges have relatives. Ever wondered at Judges blatantly violating settled law? It is not always just because they felt like it. Since surveillance always involves official secrecy, it is easily and widely abused, and abuse is never, ever prosecuted.
Do you wonder why politicians stay exactly in line, these days? Think they just don't have any ambition, no independence, no cojones?
We already have a surveillance system in place that the STASI could only have ever dreamed of.
Another example is a police internal system to request information about citizens. That has been abused many times to spy on neighbors and even celebrities. Kind of a current topic in Germany.
The statistics of a rubber-stamp court are identical to a court, where the requirements for an approved request are so clear that no one ever submits requests that are likely to be denied.
To prove what you are claiming, you have to actually show that a large number of accepted requests were "unethical".
(Disclosure: I'm occasionally involved in public relations for a local chapter of the CCC, a German NGO that deals among other things with surveillance policy.)
It’s one thing to have the ability to wiretap selectively and with some cost which makes it prohibitive to do on a massive scale; it’s another thing to require vendors and service providers to deliberately sabotage their customers’ products for them.
I mean there’s just potential for rampant abuse here. What of the right of political dissidents or other persecuted minorities to communicate safely? What of the possibility that this could be used to target a politician’s political adversaries (the way we see frequent mention of today)? There’s a whole history of abuse here, in the US and across the world, and there’s no need to facilitate the potential for such abuse on a scale we’ve never seen before.