Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time.

Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.

Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.

I think this is reason enough. The US (and others) are turning a little more despotic and totalitarian every day. Imagine what they can do with such tools?

Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.

It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.

This answer might be US specific but one significant reason for the pushback (at least from me) is the centralizing force.

Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.

Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.

A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.

Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.

I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.

All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.

I'd like to point of the recent case where a women crossed state lines for reproductive healthcare and the local police used flock to track those movements and prosecute.

The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.

Laws are not perfectly moral, and future laws might be even less so. Same goes for governments - their power should not outweigh the governed's.

You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason.

It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.

Real world results are poor. I've gotten a ticket for not coming to a "full and complete stop" at an empty intersection at 2AM. I drove up to the corner extremely slowly instead. A $500 fine.

That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.

They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.

Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.

And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.

I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.

1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.

2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?