Mr. Clemens on the Georgia officers who used the public’s camera for their own errands
A letter to the editor, from the desk of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, lately of the river, now of the roadside, where I am photographed at every mile
To the Editor:
Sir —
I wrote you some weeks ago concerning a Canadian gentleman who pointed a camera at the police and was visited by the police on account of it. I said then that no man objects to the camera so long as it is pointed at somebody else. I have since received a great many letters informing me that I was right, which is a form of mail I do not often get and have found I can bear.
The new instruction comes from Georgia, where the state’s police and sheriffs have, in the course of this season, been discovered using the license plate readers of a firm called Flock for purposes that the law did not intend. One television station in Atlanta counts more than forty persons accused in various towns across the state. The Bureau of Investigation arrested five former officers of Albany in a single week. It arrested four from Savannah, three of them officers, and a civilian besides. Three deputies in one county were charged, three more fired in another, a deputy in DeKalb, one in Clayton, and a man from a drug task force who is said to have kept his access to a city’s cameras after the city had no reason to give it to him. A prosecutor’s investigator is reported to have searched the system more than sixty times without cause.
I want to be exact, because exactness is the one thing the humorist may offer that the politician generally cannot. Cobb County, which I have heard named in this connection, has been giving its audits a good deal of public attention. Its police chief says the annual audits found no misuse by his officers, and its sheriff’s office, in a review set off by the Georgia cases, found none apparent but discovered that people with no work-related need could use the system, and so cut the list of authorized users from about two hundred to about fifty. One former officer of the town of Acworth, within the county, has been charged by the state. The larger number belongs to Georgia as a whole, and I note it because I am no friend of the exaggeration that serves my own side.
What I find most instructive is the charge. Under Georgia law, a man who misuses license plate data commits a misdemeanor. The felony, which carries a prison term of one to five years, is violation of oath of office. I take this to mean that the legislature viewed the misuse of the camera as a small thing and the betrayal of the oath as a large one, and I could not agree with it more. A man who tracks a former sweetheart across a county by means of a public instrument has not, in my judgment, broken a rule of data management. He has done a faithless thing to the people who gave him the keys.
And the keys, sir, are the whole story. I have read that one man is charged with using the system to stalk his own wife. I have read that former officers have retained access for months after leaving the force, and that a Washington newspaper found one such gentleman conducting searches for five years after he surrendered his badge. The same newspaper counted at least eleven unauthorized-access incidents in the country at large, in a network of some hundred and twenty thousand cameras, and I am not persuaded the newspaper has found them all, for the system was apparently built on the assumption that a man who is handed a key will return it when asked.
Now I will be fair, for fairness is a poor sort of vice and I am too old to cultivate a better one. These cameras find stolen cars and missing persons and men wanted on warrants, and the people who run them say they are catching the offenders themselves, by audit, which is how the Albany five were caught. The company has revised its rules after being pressed by reporters. The great majority of officers in Georgia have been accused of nothing. These are real points, and I do not make light of them.
But a safeguard that works only after forty persons have been accused is a safeguard in the way a fire department is a safeguard against a house already burning. And I cannot let pass the neat arrangement now reported from Cobb County, where a young man who knocked down several of these cameras was found by the police because one of the cameras, in the moment before it fell, photographed his truck and his plate. I think this is the first time in history that a machine has testified to its own murder.
I will end as I did before. The next time a department assures the public that it has nothing to fear from being watched, the department might be asked how many of its own keys are accounted for.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, and therefore, so far as I can determine, not among the tracked)
https://www.wsbradio.com/news/local/two-cobb-county-officers-arrested-separate-investigations-involving-children/M6K6XK3YLFFP5HE56VC5PKQDWM/