> In practice it happens rarely, and if it does the police officers tend to be pretty friendly and reasonable. Case in point, one of the two or three times this has happend to me in my life, my ID was invalid as it had expired several months before. They were basically like "Well you better get a new one soon, m'kay?" and then sent me on my way. YMMV of course.
Well remember, when we discuss government programs the only valid point of discussion is what could possibly go wrong in the hands of a despot, not how the program is applied in practice. ;)
> The big difference though between the ID card thing and privacy violations by spying is that the spying happens behind people's backs, and they may never know how broadly their rights are violated until one day the gathered information is used against them.
That has always been true in the U.S. though. Just look at the NFL tight end Aaron Hernandez, who was arrested on murder charges yesterday. During his arraignment the prosecution managed to produce a horrifying assortment of evidence against Hernandez, after only a week's worth of police work (all fully legal and with proper oversight).
The only effective difference was that in this case the government did not retain the records by themselves, but subpoena'd them from the companies as needed.
The government could still theoretically switch to doing this too. PRISM is a good example, but there's no technical reason why the NSA couldn't just require the phone and Internet companies to store all the data that the NSA would anyways, and access it on demand.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the things "spying on us behind are backs" are the things we've built onto the Internet. The Internet Never Forgets and that works to the government's advantage as much as it does ours.