To a degree I agree with you, my annoyance at the previous thread was that a lot of people seemed to be looking for a reason to say 'Well, there's nothing we can do about it', which is wrong, and, to be blunt, a bit dangerous. The problem was, as I said, that the machines were rushed into place, and, as you say, lied blatantly about, and now it 'just so happens' that they are in place with the ability to store and transmit images. No matter what heads roll, now the foot is in the door, it is unlikely to be withdrawn.
I do feel that the public didn't ask enough questions about these things, and the lies certainly didn't help, but any other new technology introduced in this way would have gone through months of testing and evaluation before being installed, and someone would have picked up on the lies, but because they were rushed in, my worries were confirmed, and the whole setup was a complete shambles, it does make me wonder how deliberate that 'rush' was...
As for the court system, I know, I'm not passing judgement on how things are done in the US, but the whole idea that because it doesn't break any laws that there's nothing whatsoever that can be done is a facetious one. I'll also note that the whole legality issue arose before this particular thread, so wasn't really targetted at violations by the Federal Government.