The knowledge that someone is being recorded in public spaces doesn’t make them cognizant of every possible law they may be breaking or prevent them from breaking one unintentionally.

There are different laws at different levels of government, and it’s unreasonable to expect somebody to comprehensively know every law on the books for everywhere they happen to be. For example, you have likely broken a city bylaw you weren’t even aware of. And unfortunately, ignorance of the laws is typically not an absolute defence when breaking them. Furthermore, there are tons of archaic laws still on the books that are absurd by today’s standards. They’re not worth the cost to waste time investigating otherwise-innocuous civilians over, but that calculation changes when there’s an army of volunteers doing it for free.

But, let’s assume somebody does know every law—they’re still human, and humans make mistakes. Opportunistic blackmailers could use the public camera pointed at this person’s house to record the 50 instances where he/she accidentally parked two inches past the driveway and onto the sidewalk.

Would the city care if someone handed them an envelope of timestamped, verifiable evidence of finable offences? Maybe! It’s free money and little effort for them to act on, and you can’t run under the assumption that they will act in good faith when presented with evidence used as blackmail when you can’t even trust them to act in good faith when they’re the only ones with CCTV access. And even if the city won’t care enough to follow up with such a tip, it doesn’t matter as long as victims think they will.

No matter which way access is regulated, mass surveillance networks only create more problems than they solve.