This doesn't make it worthless. Making things more illegal increases the costs and the risks it makes the tools more fragile and decreases cooperation of the private sector.

It doesn't replace other approaches— changing the design of the services we use to make this kind of surveillance closer to a mathematical impossibility— but its still worthwhile.

Quite right. When was the last time a government official was imprisoned and lost his or her pension for engaging in unconstitutional surveillance?

Sure, a rank-and-file cop stalking an ex-girlfriend by looking up her whereabouts in a law enforcement database may occasionally get disciplined. I'm talking about people with "director" or "section chief" or "attorney general" somewhere in their title.