I Just Wanted to Know What the Fucking Camera Was

I just wanted to know what the fucking camera was.

That's it.

I've been noticing more and more electronic shit hanging over the streets of Santa Fe. Cameras. Sensors. Things that look suspiciously like license plate readers. Other little technological gizmos whose purpose isn't immediately obvious unless, apparently, you work for the government agency that put the fucking things there.

And I don't like them.

I've written plenty about automated traffic enforcement before. I don't like cameras enforcing traffic laws. I especially don't like them as a motorcyclist because context fucking matters. Sometimes accelerating is the safest thing I can do. Sometimes getting the fuck away from a developing situation is safer than grabbing a handful of brake. A police officer can see that. A police officer can stop me, talk to me, listen to what happened, look at the circumstances, and make a judgment.

A camera sees a fucking number.

But that's another rant.

This one started because I wanted to know what the fuck all this equipment is.

So I went looking.

And holy fucking shit.

I started digging through the City of Santa Fe's website trying to answer what seems like a pretty basic question for someone who lives here and pays taxes here: What are those devices hanging over our roads? Who put them there? What do they do? What information do they collect? Who authorized them? And how much are we fucking paying for them?

I didn't think I was asking the city to explain quantum mechanics.

Apparently I was wrong.

There are ordinances. Resolutions. Police directives. Procurement documents. Contracts. Governing Body agendas. Committees. Departments. Policies. Programs. City code. A city charter. State agencies because, naturally, some of the fucking roads running through the city aren't actually the city's roads. There are different systems administered by different entities under different authorities, all wrapped inside a government website that makes finding a simple fucking answer feel like an archaeological expedition.

At some point I stopped wondering what the fucking camera was and started wondering what the fuck happened to government.

Because this isn't how this is supposed to work.

And spare me the lecture about how government is complicated because society is complicated. I understand complicated. I'm not a fucking idiot.

I made it through Naval Nuclear Power training, one of the most academically demanding programs the military has. I operated nuclear propulsion equipment underwater in an environment where understanding exactly what a system did wasn't some intellectual fucking exercise. I have a bachelor's degree in political science. I'm three classes short of a nuclear engineering degree.

I can read technical shit.

I can read government shit.

I can understand complicated systems.

And I'm sitting here trying to understand my own fucking city government thinking, Why the fuck is this so complicated?

That's a problem.

The government created by the framers wasn't a thousand-page fucking flowchart. Read the original Constitution. It's not enormous. The structure is remarkably understandable. Congress does this. The president does this. Courts do this. Here are some limitations. Here is how these pieces interact. Then the Bill of Rights comes along and, among other things, tells the government there is a whole bunch of shit it doesn't get to fucking do.

Was the system sophisticated? Absolutely. Were there arguments about what various provisions meant from practically the moment the ink dried? Of course.

But sophisticated and incomprehensible are not the same fucking thing.

And local government should be even closer to us. This is supposed to be the level of government I can fucking reach. These are the people fixing the road outside my house, maintaining the water system, running the fire department, policing the streets, picking up trash, maintaining public spaces, and keeping the basic machinery of a city functioning.

Instead, local government seems to have followed the federal government's example and metastasized into this sprawling bureaucratic organism with its fingers in fucking everything.

And complexity has a consequence.

It insulates government from the people it's supposed to serve.

Maybe nobody deliberately designed it that way. I don't need a conspiracy theory to explain bureaucracy. Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy just fine all by itself. One program needs an administrator. The administrator needs a policy. The policy needs a process. The process needs oversight. Oversight needs reporting. Reporting needs another administrator. That administrator needs a committee. The committee needs staff. The staff needs a fucking strategic plan.

Keep doing that long enough and eventually some woman sitting at her kitchen table just wants to know what the fucking camera over St. Francis Drive does, and answering the question requires a minor in municipal government.

That's fucking absurd.

Government derives its authority from us. Not the other way around. We aren't subjects occasionally permitted to peek behind the curtain and see what our rulers are doing. The fucking government is ours.

Which means we should be able to understand it.

I shouldn't need a law degree to figure out who authorized a piece of surveillance technology. I shouldn't need an engineering degree to determine what information a sensor collects. I shouldn't have to file a public-records request just to discover what government equipment hanging over a public road is fucking doing. I shouldn't need to search years of council agendas to determine when somebody decided spending my tax dollars to watch me was a good fucking idea.

And that's before we even get to the surveillance itself.

Because I don't fucking want it.

I don't want my city littered with automated license plate readers. I don't want cameras replacing police officers. I don't want sensors listening to vehicles. I don't want government building databases containing the movements of ordinary people who aren't suspected of a fucking thing. I don't accept that every new piece of technology capable of monitoring us should automatically be deployed merely because somebody can slap the words "public safety" on the purchase order.

Liberty doesn't mean government gets to watch everybody and promises only to use the information responsibly.

Liberty means government needs a damn good reason to be watching me in the first fucking place.

And when government does exercise power, understanding how that power works shouldn't require decoding layers of bureaucracy that would make the federal government proud.

Maybe that's the larger problem.

Government has gotten too fucking big for its own good.

Not merely big in dollars or employees. Big in scope. Big in ambition. Big in the number of things government has decided are somehow its fucking responsibility. Every problem becomes a program. Every annoyance becomes a regulation. Every technological capability becomes another tool government simply must have.

Then we wonder why nobody can understand the fucking thing anymore.

Maybe city government needs to remember what a city government is actually for.

Keep the water running.

Maintain the sewers.

Fix the fucking potholes.

Sweep the streets.

Change the street lamps.

Pick up the trash.

Maintain the parks.

Send firefighters when something is burning.

Send police officers when somebody’s  being  robbed or attacked.

Do the basic, boring, unsexy work of maintaining a functioning city, and do it exceptionally fucking well.

Maybe if government spent a little less time figuring out new ways to monitor us, regulate us, photograph us, record us, measure us, fine us, and collect information about us, it would have a little more time to fill the goddamned pothole I have to dodge on my motorcycle every fucking day.

And maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't need an entire bureaucratic fucking labyrinth to explain who is responsible for filling it.

I started all of this with one simple question: What the fuck is that camera?

I still want the answer.

But now I have another question: Why the fuck is my government so complicated that finding the answer is this goddamned hard?

Government belongs to us.

We shouldn't need a map through the fucking labyrinth to figure out what it's doing.

Fix the potholes. Keep the water running. Sweep the fucking streets.

And get your goddamned fingers out of everything else..