> The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies.

You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.

We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.

Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.

We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.