This is the kind of techno-utopian fantasy that keeps authoritarianism looking respectable. “Just encrypt it and only decrypt with a warrant” sounds lovely on paper, but in practice you’ve still built the infrastructure for a 24/7 panopticon - you’ve just wrapped it in a legal fig leaf.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.