Is this actually a real problem for normal non-criminal people? Murders happen every day and this would help deter or prevent repeat offenses. But having information about you that's correct, and can't be used in court because it was obtained without the correct warrant, when is that ever a problem? I'm not talking about high profile journalists or terrorist suspects. Just normal people like you.
I live in a continent with a lot of fresh memories about uncomfortable answers to your questions. No need to go as far back as WW II: take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi for a painfully contemporary read.
It’s astonishing how quickly we forget. It’s astonishing and painful, to the memories of those whose pain and sacrifice was, in the end, wasted on us :(
We have such an astonishing amount of laws and codes that everybody is guilty of something. And the more data is available on you, the more you enable the government to go on a fishing expedition, should they ever dislike you.
But that's only the selfish motivation.
The wider reason is that mass surveillance can easily be used to silence dissent. And if you think that's far-fetched for the US, I invite you to read up on e.g. COINTELPRO.
That's a slippery-slope argument. Guns can be used to silence dissent. Violence can be used to silence dissent. Targeted facebook ads and social-media emotional warfare can be used to target dissent. Skilled orators can be used to silence dissent. So can political distractions, wars, etc. All of it can and does, so I wouldn't quite call that an effective measure of whether something should exist in our political sphere or not.
Those laws/codes that you mention are there for a reason. We shouldn't be breaking them, is what we're told. If the whole thing was built on the predicate that only a fraction of people would be charged with them, what sort of criteria do you think those lawmakers had in mind as to when to apply that charge? Well, silencing dissent, for one.
But more to the point, either they're valid crimes and we need to do everything that is reasonable and cost-effective to enforce them. Or, we don't really consider them a crime, but we work on some funky as yet-undefined honor system about when to apply those laws. I.e. Let's use them to stick it to the bad-guy™. Usually, it's at the whim of whoever is deciding on whether to charge someone.
You are absolutely right that government can use these laws against you if they dislike you. But they can do that with a whole host of other things that we consider pretty benign. Being a white minority and a foreigner in an majority black country, I am constantly singled-out and harassed and at the whims of whatever government official I interact with. Usually police, but desk-clerks and the like also have their fair share of it. Government, and their agents can ruin your life on whim, even with existing non-surveillance-like laws.
We need to get past the point where vagueness and subjective criteria are used to enforce whatever laws we deem as a society to want to have. The vagueness and subjectiveness is the problem, not the laws.
It's not a slippery slope if the government already does it, no?
And mass surveillance can be used to silence on a large scale - that's the whole point of objecting to it. It's not about you. Or me. It's about the effect on society as a whole
