America Is Building a Surveillance State Like China’s

One of the most prescient lines from George Orwell’s 1984 the 1949 dystopian classic about Big Brother, regards that fictional society’s endless surveillance: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” Modern Americans’ instinct is to post their every thought and photo on social media, but we still should be wary of the way new technologies track and monitor us throughout our day.

Some of this Brave New World tech is unavoidable and mostly benign. The website cookies that require our consent via pop-up notification are designed to track our buying habits so that private companies can sell us more stuff. It’s annoying, but do I really care that I get a few ads for car parts after I searched for a new trailer hitch? And some of the surveillance is self-imposed. My wife laughingly told me how fast I rode on my motorcycle and the towns I visited after my latest ride thanks to a tracking app that reassures her that I’m not lying somewhere in a ditch.

But, as always, the real problem is government. It’s one thing when your wife is snooping on you, quite another when police and revenuers are randomly collecting information about your whereabouts—without court oversight. The Fourth Amendment is clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” Yet police agencies use the latest technologies to bypass the warrant process, all in the name of “public safety.”

The latest fracas involves Flock Safety cameras. Using these Advanced License Plate Readers (ALPRs), governments are “quietly trying to build a nationwide mass surveillance system” notes the American Civil Liberties Union. “If there are Flock cameras in your city, they are tracking, logging and sharing your movements without a warrant.” More than 120,000 of these atrocities are operating in the United States today—and that number is rapidly growing.

In the communist Chinese surveillance state, the authorities use facial recognition software, tracking systems and biometric databases that create holographic profiles of every person. Called “Bright Eyes,” this system is straight out of science fiction. It’s the perfect police-state model for controlling the populace along the lines of that “1984” quotation, given it’s impossible to act and speak freely if you’re being watched by people who have the authority to put you in prison. America isn’t there yet, but ALPR technology is leading the long march to this dystopia.

Some Americans are pushing back. The Los Angeles Police Department has paused its contract with the company. “We wanted to address some of the civil liberty and civil right concerns and ensure that there is clarity over the terms regarding privacy, data ownership and security,” LAPD said in a statement. The department’s main concerns surround information sharing with federal agencies. In the face of pushback—including activists who cover up or disable the cameras—Flock assures the public that its products should only be used with strict privacy and accountability measures.

That’s fine and good, but whenever police agencies have intrusive tools some officers will abuse them. We’re seeing this all over the country. The Washington Post found at least 62 cases of police officers who have “been accused, charged with or convicted of misusing Flock’s system and other license-plate readers to spy on people’s locations, including to stalk their girlfriends and ex-wives.” We saw a particularly troubling case in Orange County, where the former officer received what seems like a slap on the wrist (attending a domestic-violence program and informal probation). Police agencies that embrace these systems to make their work easier can’t be trusted to police themselves in such matters. Their operating philosophy seems to be: “If you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.”

Abuses aside, the camera problem is more fundamental: They seem to violate the Constitution by tracking our movements in a way that curtails our freedoms, even though we don’t have a definitive Supreme Court verdict. If the government can use artificial intelligence to wantonly review where we’re going, who we’re visiting, what neighborhoods we frequent and whatnot, they can build a profile. Then similar to Minority Report, they can predict whether we might be behaving in a manner that’s illegal or troublesome for the authorities.

The Trump administration has unabashedly bent and broken privacy norms as, say, ICE officers have traipsed on private property and detained American citizens without warrants. So just wait for another couple of administrations to guess where this nation might be headed.

Highly advanced technologies—and they keep advancing with lightning speed—will provide the infrastructure for a police state. And then, to quote Orwell’s 1984 again, the only way to keep a secret, will be to “hide it from yourself.”

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.