These laws do not stop at targeting society’s most vulnerable. They also attack the legal and social norms that underpin our system of government. They turn citizens into spies in a surveillance scheme more reminiscent of a totalitarian state, and shred the vital principle that the laws are applied equally to all people.
These laws “allow you to stalk, surveil, harass, impede upon individual’s constitutional rights,” says Michele Goodwin, a specialist in constitutional law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “And that is why this is so dangerous to democracy.”