A remote Alaskan village has installed 80 surveillance cameras on its street. People are a little freaked out:
"You better smile. You're on camera," says Roberts, 64, a barge captain. Roberts himself isn't smiling as he points out a single camera on the side of a building. The camera is aimed toward an alley.
"It's amazing, isn't it?" he says. He drives around town in his pickup, spying on the cameras that he believes are spying on him. "Everywhere you look, there's one looking at you."
Roberts, mayor of Dillingham from 1972 to 1978, says the cameras constitute an invasion of privacy, and beyond that, they're just plain creepy. He scratched together a petition demanding removal of the cameras and collected 219 signatures within days. He carries the ragged sheaf of names next to him in the truck.
Now, I read Orwell's 1984, but I don't understand why people are so freaked out by surveillance cameras. To be honest, the cameras also strike me as a little creepy, but like many of my fears, when you sit down and look at them, they don't amount to much. Surveillance cameras are placed in public streets. What are people doing in public that needs to be guarded? Do you not want "Big Brother" to know that you're going to the grocery store, to the video store, to the porn store? Well, if they're legal activities, what are you worried about? What is the government going to do with the information that I drove to work at 7:40 this morning, got out of my car, double checked to make sure I locked it, then fumbled for my office door key? I tell you what Big Brother is going to do: he's going to commit suicide out of boredom.
I honestly can't think of anything that I intentionally do in public that I'd be ashamed for my 11-year-old daughter to see.
I know, I know: "What about the slippery slope, man! Pretty soon, they'll have surveillance cameras in our bathrooms!"
Thing is, the whole slippery slope is a stupid argument, albeit the highest philosophical achievement of high schoolers and stoners. Every law is a slippery slope. Once you agree to speed limits, for instance, the slippery slope tells us they could go from 70 to 3. The same could be applied to any law.
Heck, for that matter, the same could be applied to every human action. Once you admit the goodness of showering, there's a chance you could spend three hours a day in the shower. Every human activity has slippery slope potential, and that's why it's a bogus argument. You might as well oppose every human law and activity on grounds that it could cause death because, at some point and in some circumstances, it could.
