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> The typical example is: would you want a boot to appear on your wheel, in your driveway, the minute your license plate expires?

As long as they simultaneously provide the renewal for the license, why not? It would even be a service, since I would have less of hassle dealing with it and remembering to go to their office.

A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.

The trouble comes in areas where there is more uncertainty, with laws that are so flexible that it's hard to tell whether you're guilty or not even when you know all the facts. If any prosecutor with an ax to grind can charge anybody with a crime, you have a problem. If, in addition, there are efficient databases that allow the prosecutor to find evidence against anybody even long after the fact, you have a recipe for totalitarianism.

> A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.

Indeed. One route (the one that I'm trying to keep echoing in my head these days) to thinking about such a nicely-efficient government is to ask how something would go in Iain Banks' Culture.

I'm personally not interested in using web surveillance to catch abortion bombers, the police already have very sophisticated and functional methods.

Did we need a google tap to find McVeigh?

Additionally, your comment of 'If you think the U.S. is headed in the direction of outlawing alcohol or teaching creationism is all schools, I respectfully suggest you find something different to worry about -- maybe pot... wait, we are becoming more lenient on it as well.' is very nonconstructive. To say that trends do not buck or that social opinion never sways is the height of short sightedness.

Do you think we need another constitutional amendment to augment the 4th and make data that corporations gather about us be considered private and require that the government obtain a search warrant in order to get that data from the corporations?

This is a very constructive question. I'm afraid I am not qualified to answer. I would like to think we just need to get congressional action explicitly delimiting the privacy scope as illustrated by the 4th.

I'm generally in favor of leaving the constitution technology agnostic.

I mentioned abortion, etc, simply because they are currently contentious in US society.

For a history lesson, consider how unfortunate it would have been to have had this technology back when England kept switching its official religion from Catholic to Protestant and believers in the wrong one were murdered by the state. It would have made the whole slaughter much easier if they could run a quick SQL query to determine who was in Father Jack's parish and where their cell phone said they were hiding out.

Totally! And automobiles, airplanes, rifling...