After some back and forth I am not registered currently (grin) so I just write it here:

I would like to see a workshop on that topic. A lot of the people who are registered are either doing it themselves or providing services allowing others do to it: Move a part of their substantial communication into the internet. Substantial in the sense of: Making up your life. It's important to you.
While there certainly is an aspect of "if it's important it has to work", which would be interesting to explore (in terms of: How to make sure it works when the power fail[s/ed], the other question is:

If the States force providers of telephony and electronic communication to retain all the relevant data, it's easy to create ex-post a communication profile. If you add the location data from the Mobile Phone providers, you have a person bare-ass naked, over the barrel.

Constitutions in Europe contain(ed) provisions to protect the civilian from a nosy state (and opressive governments). In the name of fighting crime (terrorism, sexual abuse), states now become more and more addicted to "just get the data". Probably because a good number of politicians think the internet is somehow a big telefon conference or so. Whatever. And they succeeed, because the people who stand up to protect civil rights are directly or indirectly accused of supporting horrible crimes. You don't want the police to be able to listen to the telephone? You must be in favour of the terrorists! Or do you have anything to hide?

The result is that, in the apparent name of "the good", data gets collected of everybody (who is not advert enough to shade his communications). There will be a tool.

Now imagine we have this tool. Communications are traced. Like weapons, tools are neutral. They become bad or good as they are applied. However, for databases there's the rule that "it will be abused". And mainly because of its' neutrality.

Police organizations are neutral as well. They intend to protect "the law", "the order" (and themselves, even policemen like to keep their jobs). We've seen that happening in history enough. They sing the song of the one with the paycheck.

And that's where the kink is.

Constitutions of liberal and free states have been created to ensure that "the leaders" will never again be able to become "the Führer". A key element of that is to grant people rights and push back the state who tries to cut down on those rights, to intrude peoples' privacy. And to write down religious tolerance in laws, but that's yet another topic. So, tools:

Because knowing to whom people talk, when, and where they are, is key to control the masses. If they don't agree with you.

If now tools are established, even in the faith of "fighting terrorism", these tools will survive the foreseeable limited lifetime of terrorist leaders. And then they will be "there", and they will be used.

This means that the built-in fuse against totalitarism gets silently loose, calm hands are touching it and, millimeter by millimeter, trying to unscrew it.

I would like to see, attend, a workshop with deals with this topic. I think there are people who could be invited to attend and get a good discussion going. I'd be willing to ask them to join as well.