I hate crime, but I have tracking and the surveillance state even more.

My neighbor recently had her Jeep stolen. Someone has recently been in my car and glove compartment. This is awful and these people need to be caught and prosecuted.

But the fact that the government can track everywhere we go (they already can with smartphones) is the first step to punishing people for association or enforcing where we go. And these systems will be abused.

I have the same thoughts as you. So much tracking and data gathering yet prosecuting a simple theft requires months & months of “investigation” & “court process”.

Increasingly I have come to almost believe my brothers take on things that the mafia moved into politics/judicial/bureaucracy from the union days.

Not "will be": "are being" abused. Even a cursory search finds many cases of police abusing the information to stalk exes, for example.

Yes we can already see this with ICE going after social media critics, and the potential for it with the president's NSPM-7 directive defining domestic terrorists as anything that's not "traditional values", anti-fascist or critical of capitalism.