BY Todd Rutherford, Garry Smith and Victoria Middleton*
December 18, 2013. The State. Columbia, SC — South Carolinians pride ourselves on our respect for personal liberty and freedom from government control of our lives. Unfortunately, state and local governments are gaining surveillance capability that has a lot in common with the National Security Agency’s mass collection of our personal information.
For example, a growing number of cities, towns and counties are attempting to protect citizens from driving distracted by banning texting while driving. While this may be intended to increase safety, it can have unintended consequences.
The typical smartphone includes location information, pictures, emails, contacts, calendars, personal records such as banking information and often access to personal and business files. Even the typical dumb phone includes location information, contacts and often pictures, calendars and other personal information.
Today you are protected from intrusion into your home to search for this information — the government would have to go to a court and justify a search before police could enter your home. However, that protection goes only so far today, because that information is conveniently stored on your phone, and our out-of-date electronic privacy laws fail to provide adequate protections for information stored electronically. It has never been so cheap and so easy for our governmental agencies to access and record the details of our daily lives. And it doesn’t end with cell phone searches.
Consider automatic license plate readers: This seemingly innocuous technology snaps photos of passing cars’ license plates and stamps them with the location, date and time. While these scanners once were limited to uncontroversial purposes such as identifying stolen vehicles, increasingly they save the photos for months or even years — even though virtually all of the people whose movements are being recorded are completely innocent, and even though travel patterns can reveal sensitive details of our lives.
Ultimately, as technology continues to advance, we face the prospect of a government capable of accessing and storing the movements, communications and electronic data of every person. This sort of surveillance constitutes a significant invasion of privacy, which can reveal many things about our lives, such as what friends, doctors, protests, political events or churches we may visit.
In today’s hyper-partisan world of divisive rhetoric, concern over revelations of massive government intrusions into the private electronic information is crossing the divide and bringing people together for the common good.
There is growing bipartisan support in Congress for the USA Freedom Act, which would limit the bulk, suspicion less surveillance of Americans. While Congress considers the USA Freedom Act, it is incumbent upon state legislators to also take action to protect our privacy from state and local government intrusion. This effort has drawn together such a wide array of groups as the ACLU, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, TechFreedom and companies such as cloud-storage-provider Data Foundry.
In South Carolina, it has brought together an equally diverse group of organizations and individuals who support legislation to regulate government monitoring of citizens. The three of us find common ground in the need to protect our privacy and hope that more citizens and legislators across the political spectrum will join us.
The fact that we have the technological ability to monitor citizens 24/7 doesn’t mean we should. We and all our elected representatives have a crucial role to play in determining which uses are appropriate, which ones cross the line and what privacy protections should be in place when cutting-edge technology is used for surveillance and police investigations. We are grateful that this debate is beginning in the halls of Congress. It needs to happen in the halls of the S.C. State House as well.
*Ms. Middleton is executive director of the S.C. ACLU. Rep. Rutherford is a Columbia attorney and S.C. House Democratic leader; Rep. Smith, a Republican, is a Simpsonville businessman.
