Advancement in the social code is only possible because people can get away with violating it.
There is another good point as we move towards more perfect surveillance and enforcement of laws; so many of our laws are designed with the idea that you will only catch x% of infractions. If we knew we would catch 100% of the violators when we created these laws, we might have chose different thresholds and punishments.
For example, take speeding - if we knew that we would catch 100% of people driving faster than the speed limit, we might set a higher speed limit and a lower penalty. We set the current penalty based on the idea that it needs to be high enough to offset all the times that we speed and don't get caught. For example, if we get caught 1% of the time we speed, then we can expect a $500 fine for speeding to cost us about 5 dollars per time we speed. If we are caught 100% of the time, that jumps to $500 per time we speed.
Also, the speed limit is lower because we can't enforce it perfectly - we need a little bit of a buffer, so that a cop can be sure the person is speeding before issuing a ticket. This means speeds are lower than they should be with perfect enforcement.
We really need an overhaul of our laws if we are going to allow automated and perfect enforcement.
In fact, one of the reason I dislike anti-discrimination laws are because enforcement using things like statistical analysis was really only designed for unskilled labor and the like.
I don't think the court would have a problem with the police discovering you buy weed because you call a weed dealer every week.
But this URL isn't just telling them who you are "calling" / httping with, but what exactly it was about.
I think the internet equivalent to phone number is the IP address.
The problem now is that there is JUST SO MUCH metadata that it is losing that distinction. If someone calls a known pot dealer once a week, then it doesn't matter whether you hear the call or not, you can still infer that the caller picks up every week.
A DOJ lawyer once said to me that "when survellience is ubiquitous, the role of law enforcement becomes the role of a prison warden, where everyone is an infraction waiting to happen."