"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
-Benjamin Franklin
So overplayed, yet so apropos, is the above quote that one can’t be faulted for repeating it now and forever; sometimes clichés are clichés for good reason.
One would have hoped that the excessive excesses of the post-9/11 surveillance state, spawned opportunistically on the ashes of the greatest terror attack on American soil in history while the nation was still traumatized — the most opportune moment for state power grabs being in moments of crisis and anxiety — might have conferred enough of a lesson about giving up basic, hard-won civil liberties for illusory safety.
But it seems historical lessons are easily forgotten, if they were ever absorbed at all.
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As we covered in a recent article about vigilante attacks on Flock cameras, there are now well over 100,000 such surveillance devices erected all across the United States at key traffic hotspots, which record literally every car’s license plate that passes under them. With a high enough density of these cameras, they effectively enable the government to track the movements of anyone who routinely drives along routes where they are located.
What could possibly justify such a dragnet that so clearly flies in the face of the spirit, if not the letter (an open legal question), of the Fourth Amendment?
“Safety,” of course.
While commonly referred to as “Flock” in common parlance, the actual name of the surveillance company is “Flock Safety,” not to put too fine a point on it.
The very first line in Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley’s X profile, in fact, reads “safety is a fundamental right” as a declarative statement.
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I initially brushed “safety is a fundamental right” off as standard progressive babble used to lull would-be liberal critics into complacency — these people love declaring new rights on an almost daily basis — but the more I consider its implications, the more impressed I am by the audacity of simply declaring “safety” to be a “fundamental right,” as if no follow-up questions are necessary.
Perhaps we missed that enshrinement of “safety” in the canon of American rights.
Surely there was some formal process to formulate, debate upon, and recognize the right to “safety”? Some kind of national convention of elected representatives to advise and consent on the construction of such a sweeping concept as the “right” to “safety”?
Surely.
One shudders to think that Garrett Langley invented it out of thin air in order to serve his own interests in turning America into an Orwellian dystopia.
Having lived for years in the Third World, where “human rights” is either not a thing at all or an exotic import from the West that the local population poorly understands and that exists only theoretically in law, I spent a lot of time thinking about the whole concept, which I previously might have merely taken at face value, having been educated and acculturated in the West.
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From my expat memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (emphasis added):
To question human rights makes you something akin to a Nazi sympathizer; a deplorable, as Hillary Clinton might say; an unthinkable monster.
Rights add up by the day. No one ever subtracts rights from the apparitional list some authority keeps somewhere — rights are only added. More and more rights, all the time, until the full utopia is birthed.
They catch on like fashion trends — designed by influential hipster professors and decorated attorneys with lawsuits to file on behalf of their new class of fresh-pressed clients.
Their fresh-pressed clients, the decorated civil rights attorneys will say in court, have been brutalized for centuries, even millennia, by state-of-the-art 2017-edition bigot oppressors violating their client-victims' newly-issued inalienable rights.
Whenever a new right hits the market, trendy sociology professors and established academics parrot each other telethon-echo-chamber-schizophrenia-style until the chic new right is firmly enshrined in Western values — inalienable, unquestionable, and irrefutable…
Universal rights this and human rights that — it never ends. It goes on and on. By the day more and more rights are manufactured assembly-line-style by shiftless, empty-eyed wormy sons of b****es at the UN or Amnesty International or wherever.
Then, after they pump them out, the same bureaucrats who focus-grouped them hocus pocus-style into the public psychology go on to pretend like the new "rights" for "protected classes" weren’t just whispered into existence five minutes before… like they aren't twisted figments of depraved Western imagination with an unfixable fixation on liberalism as a lifestyle — or, more than that, a religion… The Church of Neoliberalism™.
"These rights always existed," they'll insist; it's just that, they'll explain, those inalienable rights remained undiscovered, like some archaeological treasure lost to time under layers of sediment, until some enterprising publicly-subsidized social scientist dug them up out of the ground like a long-forgotten artifact.
They'll continue, with condescending-PhD-taxpayer-subsidized undeserved certainty, that there's some rational scientific method to uncovering rights — some logical process of hypothesis and duplication and peer-review.
