Say Anything Blog

I’m not surprised at this outcome, because honestly the debate over it has always baffled me.

Crime-fighting beats privacy in public places: Americans, by nearly a 3-to-1 margin, support the increased use of surveillance cameras — a measure decried by some civil libertarians, but credited in London with helping to catch a variety of perpetrators since the early 1990s.

Given the chief arguments, pro and con — a way to help solve crimes vs. too much of a government intrusion on privacy — it isn’t close: 71 percent of Americans favor the increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent oppose it.

It’s worth noting these cameras simply document people while they’re out in public.  If we strip all the paranoid “Big Brother” rhetoric from this issue, the questions we need to ask ourselves are these: Are our actions in public private?  Do we have an expectation of privacy while on private property?

The answer to those of those is, of course, “no.”  Anyone can see you, video tape you and/or photograph you while you’re out in public.  It’s not illegal for them to do so, nor can you legally (except within the bounds of what could be considered harassment under current law) ask them to stop.

Of course, if you don’t think the government should be spending your tax dollars on these video cameras, that’s fine.  But there’s nothing illegal or even all that objectionable about them.  And keep in mind that it’s not just the government that uses them.  If you start getting harassed by a cop or something, or if someone commits a crime against you, look around.  If there’s a surveillance camera nearby you can undoubtedly get the tape with a simple subpoena.  Meaning that these surveillance cameras are every bit as useful to the private citizen as to the government.

I’m as worried about big government encroaching on our lives as the next person, but the fight over the legality public surveillance cameras is both a waste of time as, again, they are explicitly legal and every bit as useful as a tool to keep government honest as it is a tool for the government to keep “dibs” on us.