What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past?
Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference!
For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data!
A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!