Saturday, September 20, 2014

No, Barn', I Don't Have to "Trust You".

In an article about the rapidly proliferating networks of license plate scanners, one cop dropped a variant of the old excuse "if you got nuttin' to hide, you got nuttin to fear":
"At some point, you have to trust and believe that the agencies that you utilize for law enforcement are doing what's right and what's best for the community, and they're not targeting your community," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. John Gaw said.
No I do not have to. There will inevitably be stories about how one cop used the networks to track his wife, or another used it to stalk her ex-girlfriend. Fuck, we have had incumbent sheriffs and opposing candidates put out contract hits on their rivals. Do you really think that political incumbents won't try to use that information to dig up dirt on their rivals?

Only a statist fool would trust the cops with a tool like this without rigorous oversight, laws on how long data can be kept and sunshine laws.

If the Snowden revelations have taught us anything, it is that government, at any level, cannot be trusted not to either over-collect or misuse personal information.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, no problemo. We can order the PD's to carry body cams and dash cams, on all the time, with no editing access. If they complain,we can just say "Hey, if you officers aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about!"

    ReplyDelete
  2. The one drawback that immediately comes to mind, regarding the issue of body cams, is that officer discretion about whether he charges you with something is much less likely to occur.

    ReplyDelete

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