... how much is the data dragnet comparable to evaluating populations in these fuzzy terms, as if any aberration or anomaly will snap-to-fit in some framework of illegality to be used for biased prosecutions ...
Show me the man and I will find you the crime. -- Lavrentiy Beria
In a world were laws typically are many thousands of pages long, universal surveillance is a problem. Laws and regulations have been expanding exponentially. It is said, but is impossible to verify or falsify, that ever person with significant business interests commits around three felonies a day. I get the impression that the rate of increase is itself increasing, which projects to a left singularity - infinite legislation in finite time in our near future, but I don't have the numbers to project when the singularity arrives. Is there any way to find the total amount of legislation in each year? It used to be that one could know how much regulation by sizing the federal register, but this is no longer the case. We have already hit the event horizon of regulation, in that the federal register has ceased to have any meaning. These days most regulations cannot be found in any well defined or meaningful place, and if they could be found it would not be much use, since current doctrine is that regulations are defeated by people merely obeying them, since this always leads to the law of unintended consequences, that mere obedience is a sneaky form of de-regulation. Rather, those regulated should believe and have faith in the purposes for which the regulations were passed. As was illustrated with the Bank of Beverly Hills, compliance with regulations no longer suffices: Holiness, faith, and zeal is required. Ye shall not be saved by works, but by faith. For Beverly Hills bank, it was insufficient to obey the regulators. Their staff had to believe in the regulators. We are close to reaching the same situation in legislation as we have already achieved in regulation, where legislation becomes a form of prayer, as regulation already has, so that the mere words on paper cease to have meaning or effect.