Full transcript
Mr. Lewis?
I know. I just Thank you.
You're on standby, Mr. Lewis.
Okay, we have Colton Langford who would
like to address the council on the Flock
system. All right. Mr. Langford, if you
please state your name for the record.
Colton Langford.
All right. I'm not I'm not a public
speaker, so feel free to heckle me.
Um
good evening, council members and mayor.
My name is Colton Langford. I'm an
attorney here in town. Some of you may
not know of me.
Like everyone else in this town, I want
our community to be to be safe. I
support our local police, and I support
giving them the tools they need to solve
crimes.
But there's a difference between
investigating people who are suspected
of committing crimes and creating a
surveillance state contrary to the
ideals of the Constitution and our
founding fathers.
Every generation must decide how much
power it is willing to hand over to its
government.
Rarely is that power taken all at once.
It's a power creep. One generation gives
an inch or two, and the next generation
gives another, and then another, and
then another. Eventually, those inches
add up to a mile.
The justifications for each inch given
are always convenience, good intentions,
and a naive assumption that it will
never be abused.
But as the saying goes, the road to hell
is paved with good intentions.
What's more, as technology exponentially
advances, so too does the government's
means to control and surveil the
populace.
Flock and systems like it
are not mere cameras. It doesn't simply
record what happens at an intersection.
Each camera systemically logs license
plates of all passersby, cataloging
where they were and when. All camera All
the camera logs are then uploaded into a
centralized national database that any
law enforcement officer with access to
the system anywhere in the country can
access at any time for any reason with
no oversight.
With enough camera cap
Sorry, it's a little loud. With enough
camera coverage, an officer can
reconstruct the entire daily movements
and and routine of a citizen with little
more than the click of a button. It
becomes similar in effect to GPS
surveillance, but without a warrant
when one of those would ordinarily be
required.
Speaking of the Speaking of warrants,
when drafting the Fourth Amendment, our
founding fathers were concerned with
protecting the privacy of the citizenry
from government overreach. Particularly
because British officials often raided
entire towns, homes
uh with a single warrant.
As such, they designed the Fourth
Amendment to require probable cause of
criminal activity particularized to the
person against whom the warrant is
sought before that citizen's and only
that citizen's privacy may privacy may
be invaded. In essence, the Fourth
Amendment requires the government to
have a good reason before invading a
citizen's privacy.
The Fourth Amendment's uh primary
protection lies with the items in which
a person has a reasonable expectation of
reasonable expectation of privacy.
What is reasonable depends on the values
of our society as a whole and what
society as a whole considers intimate.
As affirmed by the US Supreme Court as
recently as this year,
though a person does not have a
reasonable expectation of privacy in a
single one of their public movements, a
person does have a reasonable
expectation of privacy in the whole of
their public movements.
Now, proponents of this technology often
state that you have no reasonable
expectation of privacy in public, but
that's demonstrably incorrect per the
United States Supreme Court.
Think about it this way, Council
members.
Would it be reasonable to expect privacy
when your neighbor is looking at you
from his porch when you're driving by
his house?
Most people would say no.
However, imagine instead that your
neighbor followed you every time you
left your house. He wrote down where you
went, what time you arrived, and what
time you left every day for years. Most
people would find this behavior deeply
unsettling, and
most would consider it stalking.
With enough camera coverage, this is
exactly what Flock allows the government
to do, except on a scale no individual
ever could. And we're told it's less
concerning simply because the government
is the one doing it.
I would suggest the opposite is true.
Government surveillance Government
surveillance is more concerning
precisely because the government has the
resources to do it on a large scale.
Every surveillance system begins with
the best of intentions, and I don't
doubt the good intentions of this
council.
But you need only look to the People's
Republic of China
and the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea, i.e. North Korea, to see where
these systems lead.
Benjamin Franklin famously warned that
those who trade essential liberty
um
I'm running out of time.
Uh
[laughter]
Whether you agree
Benjamin Franklin famously warned that
those who trade essential liberty for
temporary safety deserve neither.
Whether you agree with the every word of
that quote, its central lesson has
endured for nearly 250 years. Once
liberty is surrendered, it is rarely
reclaimed without great difficulty. This
council has the authority to decide
whether our city will take another step
toward routine government surveillance
or whether it will it will affirm that
the privacy of law-abiding citizens
still matter.
[snorts]
I respectfully urge you all to cancel
the contract with Flock, or at the very
least let the contract expire without
renewal. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, sir.