I got into an interesting debate about nuclear weapons with a person who works on non-proliferation. Nuclear weapons are pretty stupid, especially today, since they do a huge amount of damage and provide limited to negative strategic advantage (if you nuke a city, just clearing the rubble it a 5 or 10 year project before you can even think about having it be functional again, so no advantage gained and a lot of work to have it re-contributing to the nation-state economy)

His point was that nuclear weapons were seductive because they were cheap. And even though they might cost $100M and require $25M/year in maintenance, that was a pittance compared to training, equipping, and deploying a couple of armored divisions which could similarly level a city. So having a "cheap" nuke meant you didn't need a couple of divisions of marines.

Cops have the same problem. There are only so many of them, and yet there is a lot of crime. So the combined forces of budget cuts and crime fighting pull them toward solutions of "efficiency" (which is code for more crime fighting for less money). At a logical (but immoral) extreme, if you have cameras recording everything on every street in a city 24/7 with cameras that can see in all conditions, and a crime occurs, you don't need cops you don't need witnesses, you just rewind the tape to when it happened, see who did it, and go arrest them. A police force of 150 officers reduced to one fat guy [1] sitting in a room full of monitors and recording devices. That is why these guys practically orgasm over things like the DARPA Argus-IS system [2].

Watching re-runs of Starsky and Hutch and Cagney & Lacey vs modern cop shows like Castle or NCIS gives you a good feel for the difference in efficiency that tech has brought into law enforcement.

So the weird thing is that people demand these sorts of capabilities and tools for good reasons (crime mitigation, catching bad guys after the fact) and ignore the potential for abuse (which is more often covered up). When you see editorials that the biggest drug gang in LA used to be based in the Rampart police station you realize that no amount of "good intention" protects you from a few now truly well equipped "bad apples." I've proposed to my representatives a law that would make "violation of the public trust" a capital crime. It is the civil equivalent of treason. Not a lot of traction on that effort though. That is what it will take though to protect yourself from folks who would abuse these toys to do bad things. I can't see trying to deny them the efficiencies as a winning proposition you come out looking guilty.

[1] Its a trope I see all the time, the guy watching the monitors is morbidly obese (always male) and generally portrayed as a loser. Of course their job is redundant so in the "real" world nobody would watch the monitors.

[2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2013/01/29/watch-t...