Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law. Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this? >If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that l…
> I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing. Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerf…
The example I like to use is littering. If I lived near a high traffic area, and there was a $200 fine, $100 payable to the first successful reporter, you'd better believe I would invest in some webcams and some software to do nothing but watch for signs of littering nearby 24/7, run the last 15 seconds through AI to weed out false positives, and maybe even file the report automatically on my behalf. That's almost literally money lying on the sidewalk.
At first I would probably make thousands with a $20 webcam and some manual review. Even one true positive pays for itself 5 times over. Eventually other people on my block would start doing a similar thing. The fine can only get paid to one person, usually the person who "gets there the fastest with the mostest". So then there is competitive pressure on me to make my software faster, my webcam higher resolution, my detection methods and ability to prove non-repudiation more reliable.
If you prefer walking through trash I can understand this may dismay you. If you like clean streets, I can think of no better chilling effect to anyone who might be crossing by. You can apply this enforcement mechanism to basically any kind of crime and get similar results - even and especially organized crime, which traditional legal enforcement historically has a very hard time breaking up. Hence why it's already in use by the SEC to break up the highest level of financial crimes, via things like the False Claims Act where often the only way to prove the crime is happening in the first place is to have a man on the inside why can patiently collect evidence for years before making his move. What better way to make something worth a man's time than to pay him?