A human deputy sitting beside the road in 1987 might never have noticed. He probably wouldn’t have cared unless there was some reason to stop the vehicle in the first place.

The computer doesn’t get bored.

It doesn’t look away.

It doesn’t forget.

And increasingly, that is the privacy question Americans need to be discussing.

This isn’t really about whether Dad should have gone to the Secretary of State and spent the money to register the replacement trailer correctly. He should have.

The interesting question is whether every minor violation that was once practically invisible should become permanently detectable simply because technology has made detection cheap.

There is a profound difference between a police officer seeing something suspicious and investigating it and building a technological environment in which everyone’s ordinary movements can be recorded, searched and reconstructed later.

For most of American history, privacy wasn’t created entirely by law.

Some of it came from friction.

Following someone required manpower. Checking plates required effort. Remembering where somebody’s pickup was Tuesday afternoon required an actual human being who saw it Tuesday afternoon.

Government theoretically possessed considerable investigative authority, but exercising that authority cost something.

Technology is removing that friction.

A camera doesn’t need overtime.

A database doesn’t need coffee.

An algorithm doesn’t say, “I’m not spending twenty minutes investigating whether Earl’s 1993 Harbor Freight trailer has the correct plate.”

It simply remembers.

And that creates a strange new world where activities that were always technically discoverable can potentially become automatically discoverable.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.