I have spent much of my career studying migration, crime and democratic decay in developing countries. I have also lived and worked in countries where government surveillance is commonplace, including dictatorships like Cuba and Nicaragua.
Through this, I’ve learned something important: Mass surveillance tools are a symptom of democratic decline.
Methods of tracking everyday citizens typically slip through the front door under the pretense of improving security, which is what makes Durango’s debate about automated license plate readers so concerning.
At the heart of the debate is a simple question: How much information should the government be allowed to collect on people who are not suspected of committing a crime?
ALPRs allow officers to analyze singular observations across millions of instances. Flock and Axon cameras, for example, record vehicles repeatedly, associating their owners with locations, times and patterns. Police departments then store this information in massive databases, allowing them to scrutinize vehicular behavior across the nation.
In short, companies like Flock and Axon transform scattered observations in public spaces into sophisticated maps of individualiz...