Somebody is Watching. Why You Should Care.

There is a tired refrain uttered by the day’s political spin-meisters. It is all the rage to breathlessly defend liberty and claim freedom is under perilous attack. The charge echoes off the marble walls of state houses, has been heard in every corner of the U.S. Capitol and, while statistics aren’t kept, I suspect some variation of theme is uttered every 1.96 seconds on the campaign trial.

The prevalence of this talk might cause one to think the implosion of communism in the 90s was a hoax – tearing down the Berlin Wall was a secret plot to lull us into submission. I generally dismiss the alarmists’ call as politics at its lowest, magniloquence designed to scare people to the polls. That is until I hear well-meaning people say things like; this technology will be used exclusively to snare the bad guys – if you are law-abiding citizen, you have nothing to worry about.

Something along those lines bubbled to the surface in Des Moines this week. The Polk County Sheriff’s Department owns and the Des Moines Police are buying license plate recognition equipment enabling them to check thousands of license plates with cameras posted on vehicles, in high traffic areas, in parking lots or anywhere, really. They aren’t catching people in the act of violating laws. They are used for trolling.

Defenders of the devices say the systems are efficient tools to be used to catch scofflaws and ne’re-do-wells. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it isn’t a far leap to see how collecting millions of pieces of data in a search of today’s criminals might be misused tomorrow.

Polk County is going to place the cameras at the State Fair. Thousands of vehicles flooding the fairgrounds will be documented. No doubt the devices will turn up a few deadbeats and maybe a guy with a warrant will be nabbed on his way to the funnel cake stand.

Just remember, the computers will log when you go, too. You know, the day when you should be at work. That information will never go away. Years from now, some guy with a computer will be able to plug in your name to discover how many times you went to the Fair to get a deep fried chocolate Twinkie, or how many times you passed the device installed by the liquor store, or the one in front of your old high school girlfriend’s house. All of these acts are legal, but if that narc were to use the government collected data about your private life, he might be able to make you a suspect should a stash of stolen Twinkies in liquor bottles be found hidden under a particular former cheerleader’s front porch. OK, that’s silly. You haven’t driven by her house in years, have you?

I know I sound like one of those bell ringing, microphone hogging, we need to return America to the great nation our grandfathers fought to save folks I was complaining about earlier. I am not. At least, I don’t think I am.

I lead a simple life and I am hard-pressed to see how constant surveillance would harm me. If an officer were to tail me 24 hours a day, he would be infinitely more likely to drop dead of boredom than catch me doing anything more serious than rolling through a stop sign. Moreover, I really do not care who sees me going about my business. But, with technology advancing at the rate it does in this age, even I need to be wary of what the collection of data could mean to liberty.

Police officers do heroic work every day preventing crime and taking criminals off the street. I applaud them for their service. Yet, I think it is prudent to remember the assumption of innocence is a cornerstone of our system. When somebody says you have nothing to be afraid of because you are one of the good guys, they may be right. However, you should remain skeptical.

Free people must diligently defend the right of people to do as they please, travel where they choose and live as they wish. Granted, laws must be obeyed and others’ rights cannot be trampled in the process. However, if government creates an ever-expanding database of the movements and actions of all people, and government then allows that information to be mined in continuous fishing expeditions, freedom really will be under attack.

It is far easier to defend freedom before it is under attack than to resurrect it after it has been lost.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com 
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register online essay.