George Orwell’s 1984 has many concepts and jargon that have transferred over into popular culture, such as the show Big Brother, for example. We may joke about it, but for some reason our society is beginning to look more like the satirical model.
We have been gradually letting go of our liberties for, as our government would say, the safety of our nation. Now even our city has taken one more step toward having a real-life Big Brother watch over our shoulder. The Portland Police Department is testing new cars with cameras to monitor car activity throughout the city. Everyone‘s activity.
No one is safe from this new way to destroy our privacy rights. The camera can actually make a list of all the places your car was throughout the day. Although the police claim that this is not the intention of the device, it most certainly can be a dramatic consequence.
The police claim that this new ability will only be used for our own safety, as well as tracking car thieves and stolen cars in general. I can certainly understand how that would make finding stolen cars easier.
According to Portland Police Southeast Precinct officer Terry Colbert, cited in The Portland Tribune, around 5,000 cars are stolen in Portland every year, causing around $23 million in damages. If my car were ever stolen, I would most definitely like to know that the police were doing everything in their power to retrieve it.
Especially as students, most of us don’t have the ability to park inside of a garage and risk leaving our cars parked on the street, and this system could help us get our stolen cars back. But does this system do more harm than good?
The camera is placed inside of police cars and can read license plates all around it, which will be stored inside of a central database. If it reads the license plate of a stolen car, it triggers an alarm to notify the officers. I like that it knows if a car is stolen. I do not, however, like that the database can log the actions of my car if I happen to be around.
These cameras could quickly gain new uses as they are put into practice. How long will it take before they track cars owned by people with outstanding parking tickets, people with a bad track record or even felons?
We already monitor where felons live, why not follow them in their cars? It may seem very easy to say that this highly developed system will only protect stolen cars, but it’s also easy to see how quickly it could be corrupted and find new uses.
Once we surrender even the smallest civil liberty, it is more difficult to ever get it back. I don’t see anything in this equation that is protecting us from the machine or what policies will be implemented to assure that the device cannot be used for any other purpose. There is a definite need for oversight.
It’s bad enough we’re tape-recorded everywhere we go, inside stores, shopping malls or any public place for that matter, but now we’re going to be documented inside of our cars. How can the hope of catching a few criminals be worth the price of our privacy?
No, it’s not. Our government already has the ability to monitor our phone calls and, until recently, send prisoners to a jail without trial, such as in Guantanamo. It doesn’t seem that watching every movement is out of the question.
This outcry is not to dissuade the gravity of having your car stolen. It’s a senseless crime, stealing most people’s most expensive possession. I don’t think that these cameras are really the solution, but a means to retrieve the stolen vehicles.
Perhaps it would be better to fund resources that find out who the car thieves are, where they’re coming from, and help them before they turn to crime and invade our privacy. It’s unjust to deprive the masses from liberty because of the mistakes of the few. These cameras aren’t protecting the victims of car thievery from having it happen again. They just offer a slim chance that their car will be retrieved.
These cameras may be tested on a local level right now, but it seems all too easy to have the federal government have a hand in those too. What comes next? The Thought Police?
Over the last eight years we’ve lost a lot of our personal liberties on a federal level, and this is a sign that the rules have trickled down to the local level, which is hardly comforting. This is the breeding ground for fascism, even if the police say it’s only to watch for stolen cars. It starts with the suspension of civil liberties.
Nothing about this says that they will protect our right to privacy.