Either treating all people as guilty until proven innocent is bad, or it isn't.

The fact independent of ideology, is that the entire basis of Western law is predicated on the notion that one is INNOCENT until proven guilty. The problem with things like DNA collection and computer data mining is that they assume guilt, and violate many other standards of legal precedent such as a disdain for the notion of guilt by association.

And beyond the question of violating people's inherent natural rights, often these surveillance society methods are just plain inefficient. All the electronic snooping didn't help catch the wackjob at Ft. Hood after all, nor did they stop 9/11 itself (illegal wiretapping began basically the instant Bush stole office in January 2001).

These methods do not help law enforcement to find the “needles in the haystack”, rather, they just add more hay that some schmuck has to sift through, and therefore increase the chances that they'll miss something.

They are a poor substitute for real police work and lead to overconfidence that “if only we can wiretap everybody” we'll be able to stop crime. As I mentioned with the Ft Hood thing, the wiretaps told them little, and shoddy police work betrayed them even further because they only looked at his personnel records (which in the military are pretty rudimentary) and not his training files (where all the really negative assessments were actually located).

But beyond all that, if we're ever to get any clarity, we need to start examining issues by the objective facts alone, not view them through some ideological lens.