It is still a highly human resource intensive process to investigate and punish crimes using that surveillance. It doesn't get used to identify who broke into your car and stole stuff out of it, because they just don't really care about that. They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital. If you understand what their role and focus is then the lack of enforcement on petty crimes isn't a counterexample at all.

> They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital.

Who are the regular people asserting their first amendment rights who are being hunted down? I haven't seen that. I have seen a bunch of insurrectionists having these tools used on them, and that's frankly a laudable use of these surveillance tools.

If you're using a peaceful protest as a cover for looting, honestly I enthusiastically encourage that 'they' hunt you down, because you're just a vanilla criminal at that point. That's an ideal outcome for the justice system.

It is an interesting argument, and indeed the pandemic has shown a lot of weak points in policy enforcement and government’s effectiveness, but all this could be selectively enforced upon you, and these are things that are quite easier to enable than to disable, so I think that prudency is warranted.

In bavaria the police abused contact-tracing guest books (a paper process!) for criminal investigations. Even well-intentioned surveillance can be turned against citizens.

> If we'd had the sense to do that here we probably would've saved tens of thousands of lives.

Hundreds of thousands. The US is currently at >628,000 COVID deaths. US citizens traveling abroad, or people traveling inside the US probably account for a significant number of COVID deaths outside of the US, but those are much harder to count.