None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.
What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?
Nothing wrong was done by the police here -- it's all good old-fashioned detective work. But they wanted to have Facebook use facial recognition to find the victim among all the photographs on Facebook. And that actually would have gotten them results faster, because finding the identity of the victim was enough to break the case, in the end. But it also would have been a very bad precedent in terms of surveillance.
What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?