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.
These are innocent bystanders. There is nothing suspicious about their activities other than they did something that a suspected criminal did. A perfectly legal activity? To take this to the ridiculous side, are we going to investigate everyone who took a poop at a specific time because a criminal did?
Yes. But that's not the same
> potentially investigate if there's something off?
If you're asking information from people who witnessed a crime *and volunteering information* (which is not investigating that person and not accusing them of a crime, nor is lack of volunteering information a suspicious activity) and they then generate suspicious evidence, then yes, that enables capacity for investigation. It is true that things are not static, time exists, and entropy marches on.
That's the difference. There is nothing that these people did that warrants suspicion. These people are not being asked or questioned. This was not done voluntarily. They didn't even know this was happening to them. This was a thing imposed upon them, full stop.
I want to give a scenario to help make things clear. Suppose I send nudes to my partner. The government intercepts these without my knowledge, looks at these, and deletes them, and literally nothing else happens. Is this okay? I did not know this happened to me. No "harm" has fallen upon me. And as far as I know, nothing has changed in my life. But then later I find out this happened. Let's say 20 years later. I feel upset. Do you not think I am justified in being upset? I think I do. My rights were violated. It is worse that it was done in secrecy because it is difficult for me to seek justice. It is because I have the right to privacy. It is a natural, de facto, negative, but a god given right. They put my information at risk by simply intercepting it and making a copy. It was unnecessary and unjustified.