The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that.
The next one, which I didn’t fully understand, but appeared to be in response to a swatting incident where the culprit is believed to have watched a specific camera livestream and the police provided a lot of narrowing details (time period, certain other characteristics, etc) appears far more legitimate.
They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers.
I don't think any of this appears legitimate.
Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
So not sure where you got the impression he's okay with up to 100 people being disturbed so we can catch one bad guy.
But then, he wasn't really talking about that was he? Better the guilty go free than the innocent suffer what? He was, essentially, talking about the principle of innocent until proven guilty; that innocent people shouldn't suffer by being punished for a crime unjustly.
2999 innocent people, in your formulation, though, are not being punished for a crime. They're not even being accused of a crime.
They are, however, being harmed.
It's easier to use historical examples because they're not afflicted with modern politics.
The FBI was known to investigate and harass civil rights leaders during the civil rights movement. Suppose they want to do that today.
Step one, come up with some pretext for why they should get a list of all the people who watched some video. It only has to be strong enough to get the list, not result in a conviction, because the point is only to get the list. Meanwhile the system is designed to punish them for a thin pretext by excluding the evidence when they go to charge someone and their lawyer provides context and an adversarial voice, but since their goal here isn't to gather evidence for a particular investigation, that's no deterrent.
Step two, now that they have the list of people interested in this type of content they can go on a fishing expedition looking for ways to harass them or charge them with unrelated crimes. This harms them, they're innocent people, therefore this should be prevented. Ideally by never recording this type of information to begin with.
There is a reason good librarians are wary about keeping a history of who borrowed a particular book.
I very much agree that (some, probably minimal) harm is being done to these people. Pretending that they "suffer" in the sense Blackstone was using the word is disingenuous.