In Katz v United States the Supreme Court held that, “The Fourth Amendment protects people, not just places.”

In other words, Katz, despite using a public phone booth in public had a reasonable expectation of privacy and thus any recordings made of him in the booth required a warrant.

The massive growth of CCTV has vastly reduced the amount of privacy that people have in public spaces. It used to be that if no one was tailing you, you had a reasonable expectation that your movements were not being recorded. That’s no longer the case and its due to the actions of the government in installing CCTV systems willy-nilly.

It is as if the police who were recording Katz had just kept on doing it over and over again through the years, and so people finally just gave up and accepted it. That’s not the way public policy is supposed to be made.

PS - all your arguments about not personally being affected are infantile - how many people are personally affected by the oppression in China? How about the former USSR? Most people get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep and just generally live their lives regardless of what legal system they live in.

Its only a very small minority that are personally and directly affected by bad laws. But the ripple effects can be enormous - look at Spitzer, a force for law and order taken down by an outright privacy violation and now any future affect he might have had on public policy will never happen. You’d be a fool to think that happened by pure chance - he pissed off the wrong people and they abused the system to take him out and we will all suffer for it.