In October 2019, President Trump signed an executive order to establish a commission that Attorney General William Barr explained was intended to make the police “trusted and effective guardians of our communities.” The commission was made up entirely of law enforcement.
Some of the proposals coming out of the commission are truly shocking. It could result in a national facial recognition database and easier police access to information on your cell phone.
Phillip Atiba Goff explains in The New York Times:
The commission recommends providing America’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, from small town departments to the New York Police Department, with more money for facial recognition technologies. Because federal agencies can set the reporting requirements and selection criteria for funding to local law enforcement, they often require data sharing. In this case, that could result in data collected at the local level being entered into a national database.
The commission also recommends that police departments be granted back door access to encrypted cellphones. This would make it easier for the authorities to access the most intimate details of your life. Whom you spend time with, your private messages, your financial information — all of it would be available to the government, along with any hackers who are able to take advantage of the same access point.
Goff continues:
Taken together, the upshot is clear. According to Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School, if the recommendations became law, the consequences should worry all of us. With the support of a sympathetic judge, law enforcement would face a lowered barrier to searching the contents of your phone, or adding photos of you and your friends to a nationwide facial recognition database. If the officer used excessive force in the process of obtaining that phone and claimed qualified immunity as a defense, the federal government would be obligated to regularly affirm their support for that officer’s defense regardless of the evidence.
It’s not a full-fledged surveillance state. But it’s not far off.
To be sure, as Goff makes clear, there is a long way between a proposal and implementation but these proposals if they become law would advance the federal government ability to track all of us in myriad ways at the same time that the leftists desire such tracking to keep us all in line with their socialist agendas.
It is on topics such as this that the great weaknesses of Trump and his inability to appreciate liberty at a foundational level are revealed.
He could really march us into a police state by accident.
-RW
If Barr is in charge of it then there is a good chance that nothing will happen, as he is incapable of doing anything (except eating apparently).
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