LETTER

Municipal privacy violations?

 

I learned today about the body-cam face recognition going into use by police south of the border, and a couple of times now I’ve seen the local police with one of their dark grey-coloured cars with a large “Police” sign visible only from a certain angle, with two quite small camera complexes, one on the left rear roof area pointing backwards and one on the left rear roof over the rear passenger door pointing forward at about a 30 degree down angle and rotated to left about 30 degrees. Presumably this also captures straight forward. There was a small sign saying “licence plate recognition...”.  

This could include face-recognition capabilities, as could the photo radar cameras at traffic lights. Likely, we’ll never know.

So, what peaceful and legal means are available to the citizenry when their rights are removed, not through national criminal law (e.g., C-51), but through regulatory law under the jurisdiction of municipal and provincial governments?

Our rights (especially to privacy) are being taken from us, and we are accepting it with our eyes open. We are being normalcy-biased into 1984 just as smoothly and obviously as you please.

 Pluralizing the frog in a pot analogy, as one frog, I’m saying, well...er...um....shouldn’t we jump out now?   

Conrad Odegaard
(London / Ottawa)