In my ideal world, the highly visible use of pervasive, systemic surveillance to rapidly identify, locate, apprehend, and prosecute the scores of folks that casually committed long-minimum-sentence federal crimes both discourages future criminal actions and sparks a debate over whether watching and recording everybody all the time is the way we want to live.

I’m not so naïve that I believe that’ll actually happen, though.

Tangentially, that pervasive surveillance is “saving” this investigation instead of letting most potential suspects go unidentified is indicative of the general trend of police departments getting lazy about doing actual investigative police work—-increasingly, if it’s not electronically recorded evidence, it may as well not have happened.