A common tactic of centralized control is to "boil the frog," so to speak. Start with a control that seems to most people to be lax enough to be "not that big a deal," and then later -- maybe years -- tighten the control once enough people are acclimated to the existence of the control in the first place.
If the government were to come along and say, "If you are female and are purchasing travel tickets between a state where abortion is illegal to a state where abortion is legal, we want to know about it, so we're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," then the problem may become more obvious to you.
If instead the government says, "We're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," but doesn't disclose a specific reason why, and later decides to use it to determine when females travel to states where abortion is legal, that's not as obvious a problem. At first.
In this case, it could be, "We're requiring that you use a form of payment that we can easily monitor when engaging in transactions over $X." After about 5 years or so of people getting used to that, they can move the threshold to something like $(X/2). Then after a few more years, make it mandatory for anything over $50 or $20.
You don't even have to move the threshold. Inflation will eventually take care of it. At the current rate of inflation in some EU countries it would only take 5-6 years for the value of money to be $(X/2).
A common tactic of centralized control is to "boil the frog," so to speak. Start with a control that seems to most people to be lax enough to be "not that big a deal," and then later -- maybe years -- tighten the control once enough people are acclimated to the existence of the control in the first place.
If the government were to come along and say, "If you are female and are purchasing travel tickets between a state where abortion is illegal to a state where abortion is legal, we want to know about it, so we're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," then the problem may become more obvious to you.
If instead the government says, "We're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," but doesn't disclose a specific reason why, and later decides to use it to determine when females travel to states where abortion is legal, that's not as obvious a problem. At first.
In this case, it could be, "We're requiring that you use a form of payment that we can easily monitor when engaging in transactions over $X." After about 5 years or so of people getting used to that, they can move the threshold to something like $(X/2). Then after a few more years, make it mandatory for anything over $50 or $20.
So we may want to not tolerate the activity at all, on principle. RMS' The Right to Read* is in orbit around the general theme, I think. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
* hysterically, Bing prominently provides results about locking down documents when I search it for "rms right to read"