By now, news stories of police seeing this or that on YouTube and catching stupid criminals are old hat.
The billions of youtube videos and facebook photographs are a new thing for enforcement. I wouldn’t immediately scream Good Thing or Bad Thing, but rather Powerful thing. It magnifies the ability to enforce.
The problem with a magnifier is that it uncovers bad decisions and imbalance.
Enforcement is, by necessity, a selective process. The dirty secret of enforcement is not that we don’t enforce everything because we can’t. It’s that we don’t enforce everything because we don’t want to. If we enforced, without selection, every one of our current suite of laws, our society would crash and burn, or at the very least, grind to a complete halt.
What happens when something we previously couldn’t enforce because we were blind to it, becomes enforceable? The crutch of “can’t” gets taken away, and we’re forced to accept that enforcement is a question of “want”.
If I had to pick a well known example of where our own limited ability served to buffer us from our poor decision making, well…
It would be the tower of Babel.
My guess is that if it’s really that difficult to get airlines to follow a rule, it’s a stupid rule. But more than that, if a high level politician is involved, I’m inclined to be highly skeptical of the “wanting” involved. I suspect the “wanting” has more to do with high level politics than it does with security, freedom, and equality.