Mr. Clemens on what happened when a YouTuber pointed the camera back at the police
A letter to the editor, from the desk of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, lately of the river, now of the roadside
To the Editor:
Sir —
I have lived through a good many inventions and have found that a man’s opinion of any one of them is settled by which end of it he is standing on. The telegraph is a marvel to the fellow who sends the message and a nuisance to the one who receives the bill. So I read with great and professional delight of a Canadian gentleman, one Mr. Anthony Sistilli, who has lately discovered the principle in a manner I wish I had thought of myself.
It seems that the American police departments, in company with a firm called Flock, have put up something on the order of a hundred and twenty thousand cameras across forty-nine states. They photograph the license plate of every car that passes, which is to say every car, and file the picture in a database which, I am told, other cities and other states may open and rummage through at their leisure. The citizen is not asked. The citizen is simply recorded, and the recording keeps.
The results have been mixed, as results are when a great many people are handed a great deal of power and no one is watching the watchers. I am informed that dozens of officers have been arrested or dismissed for using the machine to keep tabs on former sweethearts and the like. I am informed that a number of citizens have been locked up because the camera guessed wrong. I am informed that at least a hundred and fifty-three cities have looked the thing over and declined it, or sent it back, which is as clear an expression of public sentiment as a town ever delivers short of a rail and a tar bucket.
Mr. Sistilli, a man of one hundred and forty thousand subscribers and, evidently, a sense of humor, watched this debate and reached for a pocket-sized remedy. He bought an inexpensive camera on Amazon, hooked it to his laptop, and wrote a bit of software, with a machine’s help, in about twenty minutes. Where Flock photographs everybody, his contraption was meant to photograph only police cars, note the time and the place, and file the result in a little map. He then did what I would have done, and posted a short film.
It was seen one million six hundred thousand times. Whereupon, on the twentieth of September, the Peel Regional Police arrived at his door and spent about half an hour inquiring into his intentions.
I should like to be fair to the officers, for they were polite by his account and I have never known fairness to hurt a case. They said that mapping police movements could put officers at risk and help criminals. That is not a frivolous objection. A man who is paid to run toward trouble is entitled to a little consideration for his safety, and I would not make light of it. Mr. Sistilli himself says he does not condone the handful of commenters who got to talking about violence, and I am glad of it. I would add only that his camera, by his own testimony, could not find a police car if one parked on it. He stood an hour at the wrong intersection and saw none. At the right one, he caught two of five. If that is the dreadful panopticon, I have seen better surveillance exercised by a village schoolmarm.
But I confess that what struck me most in the whole affair was the thing Mr. Sistilli himself called “incredibly ironic.” The police, he says, were concerned about how transparency could work without compromising investigations. He suggested clear rules on how long the data is kept and a record of who looks at it, the very safeguards the American cities have been demanding. He does not think he got the distinction across. I believe it. It is a hard distinction to get across to a man whose paycheck depends on his not understanding it.
For here is the principle, sir, and it is old: no man objects to the camera so long as it is pointed at somebody else. The argument that mapping a person’s movements is dangerous, invasive, and apt to be misused is an excellent argument, and I have rarely heard it put better than by the gentlemen who were put in a position to make it. The only thing wanting was that it should have been made before the thing was pointed at them, and made on behalf of the rest of us.
I do not propose that every citizen be issued a camera and a grievance. I propose only that the next time a department explains with a straight face that the public has nothing to fear from being watched, someone should offer to lend the Chief a laptop.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, and therefore unrecorded by any camera I am aware of)