I don't see it as a difficult issue at all. The effects of false positives (and they are going to be mostly, almost totally, false positives by definition) in your scenario make it a non-starter, period. For property crimes?
I can see a rationale that they aren't really false positives since nobody is being accused or whatever, but that's just moving the goalposts such that it becomes OK to investigate random people like Nixon and Hoover (et al), but I will put good money down on the eventuality of someone with a criminal record, a cellphone, and an airtight alibi getting their home raided and them being injured or killed.
Of course it's a good source of leads, for some value of "lead." That's the problem. By way of analogy, there are plenty of people, some of them extremely high profile, who have criminally affected the world's economies and are getting away with it right this minute, so maybe let's take care of the crimes we have actual evidence of laws being broken before we get all Inspector Gadget about relatively minor crimes.
The only difficult part of the issue is how to explain it in a way that portrays it as both harmless and necessary, because it's neither.
Remember that false positives aren't really a problem to police and especially prosecutors. Most criminal cases in the US don't go to trial, so they just want enough to sweat people into plea-bargaining.
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I don't see it as a difficult issue at all. The effects of false positives (and they are going to be mostly, almost totally, false positives by definition) in your scenario make it a non-starter, period. For property crimes?
I can see a rationale that they aren't really false positives since nobody is being accused or whatever, but that's just moving the goalposts such that it becomes OK to investigate random people like Nixon and Hoover (et al), but I will put good money down on the eventuality of someone with a criminal record, a cellphone, and an airtight alibi getting their home raided and them being injured or killed.
Of course it's a good source of leads, for some value of "lead." That's the problem. By way of analogy, there are plenty of people, some of them extremely high profile, who have criminally affected the world's economies and are getting away with it right this minute, so maybe let's take care of the crimes we have actual evidence of laws being broken before we get all Inspector Gadget about relatively minor crimes.
The only difficult part of the issue is how to explain it in a way that portrays it as both harmless and necessary, because it's neither.
Remember that false positives aren't really a problem to police and especially prosecutors. Most criminal cases in the US don't go to trial, so they just want enough to sweat people into plea-bargaining.
Right, the same as the DoJ peeps who are going to be defending this: the ends justify the means.