There are surveillance cameras everywhere — in subway stations, on street corners, on highways and byways, in parking lots, in banks and stores and in businesses great and small. Our daily doings are on camera, whether we like it or not, and without our having been asked if we were OK with all of this.
Sadly, that's just the half of it.
According to a new report in The Washington Post, the Pentagon and the FBI, working in concert with the tech industry, have developed facial recognition software that could potentially be used for all sorts of nefarious doings. And the people didn't sign off on this, either.
The justification is the same as always — just trying to keep the people safe. Safe from terrorists. And from child predators.
Thing is, though, no one can seem to explain how monitoring the doings of your sister as she picks up vitamins is keeping the people safe.
We all understand how things work in totalitarian nations. Consider China, Russia, the former Eastern Bloc countries. There, when you leave the house, the powers that be know where you are going, what you are up to, who you see. They are the bosses, and the people are their subjects.
But not in America, which is still supposed to be the land of the free. At least on paper.
We need more people working to restore the old ideals.
Sen. Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, has the right idea. He is reintroducing a bill, first proposed in 2020, that would limit federal agencies' use of facial recognition and other biometric techniques. "We cannot stand by as the tentacles of the surveillance state dig deeper into our private lives, treating every one of us like suspects in an unbridled investigation that undermines our rights and freedom," Markey told the Post.
He's got that right. What's routinely happening in the United States makes living in our nation too much like being on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall when there was still an East Germany.
The type of surveillance and enhanced tracking in use here is too much, too fast.
© 2023 The Republican, Springfield, Mass. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
