Why should it matter if you are a 63yo grandmom or pastor?
That the government has used them to prosecute a man who assassinated someone or a large group of traitors does not seem to be an indictment of the capabilities.
An example of the government combing through records to pile on trivial charges to throw at a peaceful protestor or otherwise "over" charge them to create a chilling effect seems more apt for a discussion about the dangers of a panopticon.
When I brought up J6, it was not because I wanted to discuss the ideology but because this is the first time to my knowledge that we prosecuted over 1,500 people for a single event. Looking at the NPR database; Violence is 417 cases, Property destruction is 55 cases, Conspiracy is 48 cases. Assuming no overlap between those, you have ~980 people that fall into the "useful idiot" or "stupid mob" category.
Should they have been there? No of course not.
If my point can't be understood because I am using J6 as an example, please substitute J6 with Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter.
The change we are seeing with technology is not the amount of data we are storing but that we are able to process this data and build it out into a model.
hypothetical We saw you on a camera on J6 in the Capital but also have cell data showing you traveled down with other people. Don't have them on camera but the cell data shows they were close to you at all times, so we can charge them.
I wanted to link to a video of a protest I saw a little while ago; it showed protestors in Black Block swarm some cops then all run under a group of people that had umbrellas. When the group moved, all the black block clothes were on the ground so the responsible parties couldn't be tracked. However this time the police drone captures some footage of them before they changed into the black block, so they were able to make arrests.
This would be able to take it further, now you could see who the protestors trained with and charge them with Conspiracy.
The Nancy Guthrie case felt like ring cameras and Flock or traffic cams should have figured it out in no time. Yet it didn't happen. I feel like this is going to be something that only really works in cases, where investigation would solve it.
The Nancy Guthrie case on the other hand went nowhere, because we couldn't definitively make a match.
On the other hand we have multiple instances of bad data causing people to be subject to being targeted by the police. We have police threatening or arresting people based on a lack of corroboration. Some times ignoring clearly exonerating evidence.
The world is a better place without license plate cams.
It happens that the J6 rioters were on the wrong side of truth and history, but I would rather some of them get away with it than live in a perfectly effective panopticon.