OPINION:
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors had banned the street-camera use of facial technology in 2019, but given the soaring crime rate and subsequent hike of citizens’ complaints, this same governing body is now letting police put in place 400 or so license plate readers aimed at surveilling those who drive within city limits.
America’s spy society marches on. And it’s a great deal due to the fault of Democrats.
If Democrats weren’t so loose on crime, and simultaneously hateful of police, there wouldn’t be such a massive swell in technological developments to spy on American citizens combined with a massive swell in demand for these surveillance products.
How about putting them at the border where they might actually catch some law-breakers?
License plate readers are billed as common sense ways that police can catch those who’ve stolen vehicles or those who’ve fled the scenes of crimes and are wanted by cops for questioning. But they’re also intrusions on innocent Americans’ privacies and constitutional protections. After all, license plate readers scoop up data on those who’ve not been accused of any crime and transfer that data into the hands of those whose primary on-the-job function is to apprehend suspected criminals. In other words, license plate readers turn everyday Americans into suspected criminals.
This is not how the roles of citizen-to-government are supposed to roll in America.
The Constitution may not explicitly state the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” — but there are enough Supreme Court cases that have made that presumption a right for U.S. citizens. See “due process” under the Fifth Amendment. If an individual is to lose his or her liberty as a consequence of a supposed crime, then the reasons for that loss of liberty must be made clear in a court of law, and one necessary element of making that case — of making clear those reasons — is to begin with a presumption of innocence. Prosecutors have to prove guilt, but they build their cases upon foundations of implied innocence.
License plate readers are akin to police acting as prosecutors and absent warrants, absent cause, absent even any accusation of crime, taking down data on private citizens — and doing what with it, exactly? That’s one problem. That’s an uncomfortable unknown. If you haven’t committed a crime, then you have nothing to hide, right? That’s another problem, a most distressing question.
In America, it’s the citizen who holds the individual right. It’s not the government that grants the citizen the right.
In the case of license plate readers, those powers are reversed. The situation becomes one where police, in the name of safety and security, are allowed to bypass the normal warrant process, the one where the Constitution states that in order to deprive someone of life, liberty or possessions, then courts must sign permission slips giving law enforcement those authorities — and those permission slips must be narrowly tailored, naming specifically the things to be searched or surveilled or seized.
Police can’t just enter homes and tear through them in search of suspicious items. They need a warrant.
Police can’t just pull drivers over and scour through their vehicles in a hunt for compromising substances that will lead to criminal arrests; they need due cause; they need justifiable suspicions; they need reasons that will hold in courts of law as reasonable cause.
Likewise, police shouldn’t be able to do the technological equivalent of standing on street corners and taking down the name, address, license information, and real-time location information of every driver that passes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in all sections of a city — and then feed that information into a database that will alert on the possible criminal activity of the drivers.
“San Francisco will soon complete a rollout of 400 license plate readers made by Flock Safety that have the capability of notifying police immediately when a stolen or suspicious car enters the city limits, allowing them to apprehend suspects before they commit additional crimes,” Semafor wrote.
How wonderful.
Police who can stop crimes before they occur — what an amazing idea. But at what cost? As with any bit of technology aimed at bolstering safety and advancing security, the concerns need to focus on effectiveness — whether or not the security tool can actually accomplish what it promises — and perhaps more importantly, on citizen privacies and constitutionally protected individual rights and liberties.
Technology that flips the proper humble servant role of government to citizen is a red flag. Any erosion in the national mindset of “innocent until proven guilty” is a danger to individualism and a boost to Big Government, leading ultimately to a collectivist state. After all, China may tout low crime. But China also surveils its citizens everywhere they go. And when citizens do something that upsets the Chinese Communist Party, their rights and liberties are clamped — and technology often serves as the enforcer of the CCP’s will.
Today’s license plate reader is tomorrow’s iris scanner is next week’s vaccination passport is next year’s social credit system to travel. These things do not take place in a bubble, nor do they confine themselves to a bubble. Rather, one idea feeds off another, off another, off another, until society’s once-reluctant acceptance of one privacy intrusion becomes society’s hearty embrace of any and all privacy intrusions deemed needful by government. And suddenly, dissenters are radical and dangerous.
Resisters are unpatriotic and threats to all of society.
The standard for any tracking technology starts with “why” — and it’s incumbent on government to give these answers, not on citizens to explain “why not.” And safety and security are rarely good reasons to destroy the Constitution and decimate individualism.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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