The New Fucking Tea

A funny thing happened yesterday.

I showed up at work, and at some point an old friend stopped by. He’s a smoker, and I sometimes go out to the smoking pad with him to feed my secondhand habit. Honestly, it’s mostly a chance for us to shoot the shit and catch up, but I also fucking love the smell of cigarettes.

I was a smoker for most of my life. I didn’t quit until I became dead three times.

I don’t think smoking caused my earlier deaths, but it certainly couldn’t have been helping matters any. And I didn’t quit because I suddenly wanted to get healthy. I woke up from my last death yearning for life, and I wanted to squeeze as much as I possibly could out of whatever days I had left.

Anyway, there we were on the smoking pad. Him puffing away, me taking in that sweet goddamned stench and smiling.

He looked at me, grinned, and asked what the fuck I had been doing the night before.

I was literally confused.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Unloading Dawna’s trailer. She came into town last night and is moving in.”

He looked at me.

“Are you sure you weren’t out playing with your suppressors?”

Now I was really fucking confused.

“No. Why?”

Apparently somebody had gone around Santa Fe and shot up the city’s shiny new automated enforcement cameras.

And my friend heard that and immediately thought of me.

I don’t know whether I should be offended or fucking flattered.

For the record, it wasn’t me.

I was at home unloading a trailer with my fiancée like a responsible middle-aged fucking adult.

But unlike everyone immediately clutching their pearls over the destruction of “public property,” I’m not particularly interested in mourning the fucking cameras.

In fact, I think we’re asking the wrong question.

We’re asking what happened to the cameras.

Maybe we should be asking what the cameras fucking represent.

Because public property is an interesting fucking phrase when government takes money from the public, purchases surveillance equipment with it, and then points that equipment back at the same public to monitor our movement, identify alleged violations, and extract still more money from us.

At what point does “public property” stop meaning ours and start meaning the government’s?

Because those are supposed to be the same fucking thing.

And we’ve had this philosophical argument before.

Once upon a time, a government imposed something upon the people it governed. The government believed it possessed the lawful authority to do so. The people increasingly rejected not merely the thing being imposed, but the government’s claimed authority to impose it.

Eventually, some tea wound up in Boston Harbor.

The history books don’t remember that primarily as a property dispute.

They remember what the tea fucking represented.

Government power.

Government overreach.

A government increasingly disconnected from the consent of the people it governed.

The tea was the fucking symbol.

And maybe that’s what we should be thinking about when we look at these cameras.

Speed cameras. Surveillance cameras. Sound sensors. Automated enforcement systems. Databases quietly accumulating information about where ordinary people go and what they do.

Maybe this is the new fucking tea.

If you’ve read this blog lately, you already know my stance on automated enforcement, individual liberty, and government’s role in a free society.

Fuck those cameras.

I believe automated enforcement turns due process on its fucking head. A machine records an alleged violation, identifies a vehicle, government generates a notice, and then the citizen gets to enter the machinery to challenge it.

And beyond enforcement itself, I have a fundamental problem with the continued normalization of government surveillance.

Another camera.

Another sensor.

Another database.

Another automated system watching citizens move through their own fucking city.

Every one of these things, considered individually, can be made to sound perfectly reasonable. It’s just a camera. It’s just a sensor. It’s just traffic enforcement. It’s just noise enforcement. It’s just collecting license plates. It’s just another database.

It’s always just one more fucking thing.

And every time we accept another one, the relationship between government and the governed shifts just a little bit further.

That’s the part I think we’ve forgotten.

Government is supposed to be constrained.

The entire American experiment was built around a profound distrust of concentrated government power. The people who designed our system understood that majorities could become tyrannical just as easily as kings could. Individual liberty wasn’t supposed to exist because government graciously permitted it. Government was supposed to be restrained precisely so that liberty could exist.

And yes, I understand that fucking lawyers can point me toward case law explaining why any particular government intrusion I’m complaining about is perfectly constitutional.

Cool.

I don’t fucking care.

Case law tells me what courts have decided the Constitution permits. It doesn’t necessarily tell me whether we’ve remained faithful to the principles that produced the fucking thing in the first place.

Those aren’t always the same question.

I think the courts have gotten plenty of this shit wrong. I think we’ve gradually expanded what government can do, what police can do, what constitutes a reasonable search, what constitutes reasonable suspicion, and what intrusions ordinary citizens are simply expected to tolerate.

Each individual decision gets explained.

Justified.

Precedented.

Normalized.

And eventually we look around and discover that government can watch us, record us, track our vehicles, detect our speed, measure our noise, identify us, mail us an accusation, demand money, and make us initiate a process if we want to challenge it.

And somehow we call that fucking progress.

Meanwhile, local government has its own peculiar way of deciding what “the people” want.

Some retirees and activists show up at a City Council meeting in support of something, and suddenly government has heard from the fucking community.

Newsflash: most of the community is busy.

They’re at work.

They’re raising kids. Paying ridiculous mortgages. Buying groceries. Trying to keep the lights on. Trying to be productive members of society and still have enough fucking energy left at the end of the day to enjoy some small portion of their lives.

They aren’t sitting through three-hour fucking government meetings.

Silence is not consent.

And a handful of people standing at a microphone does not magically constitute the will of the governed.

So when a city starts installing speed cameras, sound sensors, surveillance cameras, and automated enforcement systems all over the fucking place, yeah, people eventually notice.

Especially when we realize the absurdity of what’s happening.

We’re paying for it.

Our tax dollars purchase the equipment.

Our tax dollars install the equipment.

Our tax dollars maintain the equipment.

Our tax dollars operate the bureaucracy behind the equipment.

And then that equipment is used to automatically fine us and take more of our fucking money.

What a fucking business model.

And somewhere along the way, government seems to have forgotten its place.

Its authority is derived from the consent of the governed.

Government works for us.

We do not fucking work for government.

So when I heard somebody shot up the cameras, I didn’t experience the outrage apparently expected of me. I didn’t suddenly feel some deep emotional attachment to a piece of surveillance equipment because somebody slapped the words “public property” on it.

I thought about the fucking tea.

Not because a camera is a crate of tea.

Not because Santa Fe is eighteenth-century Boston.

But because symbols matter.

The Boston Tea Party wasn’t remembered because Americans had unusually passionate opinions about beverages. It was remembered because the tea represented something much fucking larger.

Authority.

Consent.

Representation.

The relationship between government and the governed.

And that relationship still matters.

Maybe more than ever.

So, Santa Fe Police Department, I’m not particularly impressed that taxpayer dollars are being poured into automated systems to do the work of government while simultaneously expanding the machinery of surveillance.

And City of Santa Fe, I’m even less impressed that my money is being used to purchase systems that monitor me so you can potentially demand more of my fucking money.

You’re supposed to protect liberty.

You’re supposed to serve the people.

And maybe before installing the next camera, sensor, reader, database, or automated enforcement system, somebody should stop long enough to remember that.

Because government surveillance rarely arrives looking like tyranny.

It arrives looking convenient.

Efficient.

Reasonable.

Helpful.

It arrives one fucking camera at a time.

And eventually people start wondering just how much of their liberty they’re expected to surrender in exchange for all that wonderful fucking efficiency.

Yesterday, apparently, my friend wondered whether one of those people was me.

Again, for the record: It wasn’t fucking me.

But I understand why he asked.

Maybe these cameras really are the new fucking tea.