With the continued moves by various agencies in the Federal government to expand the data it collects and the way it makes use of it for law enforcement anti-terrorism purposes, one old saw that keeps being brought out is the idea that the “innocent” don’t have to worry about the info collected about them because, hey, they’re innocent. “Only the guilty have something to hide.”
But here’s an interesting analysis that notes that innocense is probably a lot more limited and complex a concept than folks who quote that aphorism are willing to face, and we tolerate a certain measure of guilt because of the lack of enforcement.
Indeed, the real point I am after might be understood as applying only a little to any existing laws, for it also has a forward-looking aspect: in times to come we may be confronted with new laws that are asinine or much worse, and when that happens the government’s limited ability to enforce its wishes because of practical constraints will serve as an important brake on its overreaching.
An example the author gives is the speed limit — if there were an effortless method for the authorities to ticket anyone who goes 1 m.p.h. over the speed limit, how happy would folks be about that? Would we change speed laws? Or …
On this view, perfect enforcement would amount to a change in the law itself from a pragmatic standpoint, and sometimes an undesirable one. If the government suddenly were able to costlessly identify and jail everyone who has used illegal drugs in the past X number of years, I expect that the underlying substantive laws in question would be changed very promptly. Some of our distinguished public officials would, ahem, be leading the way.
Maybe that’s a good thing — the tolerance of minor law-breaking could very well be argued to allow a broader, incremental rot in what we consider to be acceptible behavior, a slippery slope where exceeding the speed limit by 5 mph becomes exceeding it by 20 mph or more.
On the other hand, the real world is probably not as binary (legal/illegal, or, more importantly, moral/immoral, right/wrong, allowable/unallowable, tolerable/intolerable) as all that. Having our legal system, including its enforcement, reflect that may be uncomfortable, but we should at least consider the discomfort of “Total Information Awareness” — and the potential of acting on it — as well.