Those who support open-ended installation of always-on, pervasive surveillance cameras, such as those in the news story, “Springfield chief promises transparency in rolling out license-plate readers,” should read George Orwell’s prophetic novel “1984,” in which a dystopian dictatorship has installed omnipresent video surveillance with the reassurance, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

Here in Healdsburg, California, where I live, the police department has pulled what I would characterize as a typical “mission creep” bait-and-switch. It got the City Council to approve automatic license-plate readers to speed up parking control, then talked the council into installing fixed cameras to surveil every car entering the city, for any public safety purpose the police see fit.

From Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s story, it appears Springfield policy is similarly open-ended: I didn’t see any mention of limits with whom the surveillance records will be shared, how long they will be kept or for what purposes they will be used (other than not for immigration enforcement).

Broad-scope fishing expedition surveillance is antithetical to the American principles of civil liberty. If ALPRs are deployed, they must be restricted by law to use with either documented, individualized probable cause or a specific warrant. Any other collection of an image that is not deleted immediately must be prohibited, with meaningful penalties for violation.

If an image is distributed outside of the jurisdiction where it was authorized and collected, it must be only on the same basis (individualized cause or warrant). The fact that this is a new technology does not give it carte blanche to infringe on bedrock principles of liberty and privacy.

L. Peter Deutsch
Healdsburg, California

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