A ‘Reformist’ Legal Expert Calls for a Surveillance State
Principled advocacy of liberty is hard, we get it. Many of us find something so offensive or irksome that all live-and-let-live sentiments evaporate. For former criminal defense attorney Dana Bazelon, now policy director for reformist Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, that issue is guns and the violence she attributes to them. She’s discarded concerns about government abuses to endorse a wide-reaching surveillance state.
“If the idea of more police cameras makes you queasy, I understand: I spent the first decade of my career as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer and during that time, I would have treated a plan for more police-controlled cameras with suspicion and skepticism,” Bazelon wrote last week for Slate. “But acting as the policy director for progressive prosecutor and Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner for six years changed my perspective. I saw, firsthand, the cost of unsolved shootings in Philadelphia, the misery of unwilling witnesses brought to court in handcuffs, and the way witnesses could emerge from trials feeling abused and angry.”
Bazelon acknowledges that civil liberties groups are adamantly opposed to intrusive surveillance because of the implications for privacy and free expression. Surveillance is often brought in as an “emergency” measure that just never goes away as government officials find ever-more interesting ways to process the data they gather on their suffering subjects in ways that inevitably curtail liberty.
The Surveillance State’s Frightening Record
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) cautions that “mass surveillance and censorship justified by war became useful tools for more general surveillance.” In the past, as now, FIRE notes, “the issues that drove the push for mass surveillance and censorship at scale was national security and fears of extremism, disinformation and propaganda.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is so worried about the growing ease and declining cost of implementing mass surveillance that it maintains a Street Level Surveillance Hub about various snoopy technologies used by police and an Atlas of Surveillance so that travelers know which of those technologies are used at different locations along their journeys. People can turn to those tools to avoid snooping or, perhaps, take more direct action to neutralize the intrusions.
The reasons to object to mass surveillance are many, frightening, and historically well-documented. In the 1970s, the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee found the FBI “has placed mo
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