This is a sample template to use when speaking before your city or county council. Feel free to add your own style and details about your community to make it more personal and impactful.
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My name is ______ and I am here today to represent our community and its concerned members.
When one appears in public, one is subject to the gaze of fellow citizens at the expense of privacy. However, if someone follows you around in public, making a record of your comings and goings in order to establish your personal habits and make generalizations about you, that is defined as stalking. Stalking is both illegal and immoral.
In ____, under our current system of Smart City technologies and surveillance cameras, we are essentially being stalked by our own government. When we appear in public, we are not simply having our picture taken; we are being identified by our facial features and license plates and tracked throughout the city by artificial intelligence, creating an intimate data portrait of our lives. This data, our personal data which we should own, is then passed to corporations with little to no oversight or regulation and outside of our control.
The justification for all of this is that we have crime and we must stop crime. Yes, constant surveillance of the public will stop some crime just as a government-controlled surveillance camera in every living room and bedroom might end domestic violence, but those gains come at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Just because bad people use privacy to do bad things, that doesn’t mean that good people should be deprived of privacy.
As an example, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. that the right of privacy is derived from natural law and is embraced within the absolute rights of personal security and personal liberty. Personal liberty is not only freedom from physical restraint but also includes “the right to be let alone,” determining whether one’s life is a life of publicity or privacy.
In this ruling, one exception to this right is the privacy of those who seek public office. Public officials waive their right to privacy, subjecting themselves at all times to closest scrutiny so that it may be determined whether the rights of the public are safe in their hands. In other words, the politicians cannot surveil private citizens but private citizens can surveil politicians. Our current situation is, therefore, turned upside-down and unconstitutional.
I ask you to consider, if a citizen were to file an Open Records request compelling you to disclose all of your comings and goings to the public, would that make you uncomfortable? If all the comings and goings of your spouses and children were disclosed to the public, would that violate their rights? Imagine that years from now, when you are no longer in public office, this technology falls into the hands of the worst possible government. In a totalitarian society, those in places of power are surveilled more than anyone. This is not hypothetical. After the military overthrew the government of Myanmar, the same technologies that are in use in our city were used to track down the opposition and, once found, they were executed.
These are our requests:
A public list of all officials, employees, and vendors with access to our data.
- Public disclosure of the data of all public officials and anyone with access to smart city data.
- Elimination of any capabilities that personally identify individuals, such as facial recognition or license plate scanning.
- Public disclosure on an easily accessible page of the city website of all information regarding these technologies, including capabilities, associated corporations, data retention standards, and any rules limiting data usage.
- Public disclosure of computer code that drives the algorithms.
George Orwell said, “people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.” If you cannot address this dire situation for the benefit of the citizens, please do so for your own sake and for that of your children and future generations. The long-term consequences of this short-term solution are too great to ignore.