The problem is that once you do everything becomes couched in exactly those terms and so you end up with a whole bunch of 'thoughtcrime' which otherwise for the most part likely would not have come to harm, as well as artificial limitations to technology because - insert favorite bogeyman here.
Policing is like being a janitor, bad stuff happens (anyway, no matter how much you try to prevent it) and needs to be taken care of after the fact and you can't make this easier without treading on the rights of the non-criminals.
Another angle is that prevention can never be proven, you can say that you have prevented 1000 terrorist attacks last year but you can't prove that any of them would have come to pass.
What you can prove is which ones you did not manage to prevent.
So the metric should be 'solved cases' rather than prevented cases.
It's also the basis for much of our laws to preemptively tackle many potential problems and to stop them before they occur. Examples include everything from environmental regulations to corporate anti-trust laws, to work-place & consumer safety laws, food safety laws, and the list goes on...
People are innocent until proven guilty of a crime but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't limit the most abused & risky offenses before they occur. We can't trust people to do what's right - 6 thousand years of human history has shown us that people will always, always remain corruptible and inherently selfish. Expecting people to do "the right thing" is one of the most naive sentiments someone can hold. Some will, sure, but the system, society itself relies on everyone doing the right thing (all the time) and that's just impossible. All it takes is one bad actor to spoil it for everyone else, and I'm sorry, but there will always be a bad actor so that's why these kinds of laws, regulations and protections are needed.
Before those laws were created, we had numerous examples of pollution, corporate collusion, workplace hazards, etc. What awful scourge that long menaced the public are the yellow dots preventing?
You seem to be possessed of a finely-honed mistrust of human beings (which is wise), along with a credulous confidence in governments made up of human beings (which is... not).
Yes, we do this in most cases by declaring some kind of framework within which we all at least should try to conform (assuming the framework makes sense, if not there is always civil disobedience and ultimately things like revolutions).
> Examples include everything from environmental regulations to corporate anti-trust laws, to work-place & consumer safety laws, food safety laws, and the list goes on...
Yes, those are all in terms of 'do's and don'ts', they're not in terms of 'every cook is legally required to sprinkle some DNA on the food so that it can be traced back to the cook in case they mess up'. And that's roughly what the technology under discussion here is doing.
> People are innocent until proven guilty of a crime but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't limit the most abused & risky offenses before they occur.
The most abused and risky offenses can't be limited before they occur. We can try but as soon as it declares everybody under suspicion before they've even done anything wrong a line has been crossed that I personally believe should not be crossed.
For instance: preventing murder is impossible, preventing robbery is impossible, preventing terrorism is impossible. Any one of those can be perpetrated by single individuals with relatively little in terms of education or preparation. If you want to limit them effectively you're going to have to drastically change the nature of our society, which is something I object to.
> We can't trust people to do what's right - 6 thousand years of human history has shown us that people will always, always remain corruptible and inherently selfish.
Precisely. And no amount of 'prevention' will change that.
> Expecting people to do "the right thing" is one of the most naive sentiments someone can hold.
I don't hold that sentiment at all, on the contrary, I think people will do 'wrong' no matter what and that preventing a few from doing wrong by imposing measures on the rest is the wrong way to solve this problem.
> Some will, sure, but the system, society itself relies on everyone doing the right thing (all the time) and that's just impossible.
Precisely.
> All it takes is one bad actor to spoil it for everyone else, and I'm sorry, but there will always be a bad actor so that's why these kinds of laws, regulations and protections are needed.
No, that's exactly why they're not needed. You can't prevent those things, period, get used to it and adapt because no matter how many idiotic technical measures are adapted there will (1) be ways around it and (2) it won't stop those determined enough to go down that route in the first place but it will inconvenience / trample rights / disenfranchise everybody else.
So your logic is that since people will do it anyways, we don't need the laws? Do you have any idea how that sounds from a logic standpoint? "People will always murder other people, so the laws on murder are useless. Let's get rid of them".
What kind of logic is that?
> but it will inconvenience / trample rights / disenfranchise everybody else.
Yeah, just like the laws regarding food safety inconvenience the people in the industry. "Making sure our food doesn't have salmonella before we ship it to our retailers is such an inconvenience! We should do away with those regulations."
I'm sorry, but you're beginning to regurgitate libertarian nonsense. There's a reason why libertarianism never made it out of the 1800s. It's because it's an old-fashioned ideology for an old-fashioned world. It would never work in today's globalized world. Hell, it never worked period ...the fact it hasn't persisted is proof enough.