May 16 - 22, 1996 / Volume V, No. 20

But the reason the story was reported is because it's important, which occupies a higher plane in the ethics arena. It demonstrates that strong enforcement by authority figures can go a long way towards making people do what you want them to, even if it's for their own perverted pleasure. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to make them do, or the right way to make them do it.

Take the new photo radar thing. They have the technology to catch every speeder they spot. No room for human error, no costly implementation. Everybody's driving habits in targeted school zones are scrutinized.

And it's worked tremendously. Used to be, when I drove through a school zone, I did 25-30 miles per hour. Now, on the rare days when there's no traffic, I diligently keep it to about 24. But generally, I find myself driving 12-15 miles per hour in the school zones, stuck behind a terrible traffic jam. People are so nervous about photo radar, they're causing gridlock throughout the city.

This issue has been incredibly divisive, pitting civil libertarians against hang-em-high, anti-crime crusaders. Just by looking around, we can tell who's winning on almost every front - in a progressive erosion of our civil liberties, we're passing three-strikes, deprive prisoners, longer sentences, more curfews, more cops, and tougher enforcement provisions, among others.

Well, you folks do what you think is necessary. But all that stuff in the Constitution about civil liberties still means something to me. One of the greatest insights of our founders was that a people who are constantly intruded upon (be it through excessive oversight, unfair rules of evidence collection, unreasonable search and seizure, etc.) is an oppressed people.

In one of his masterworks, Discipline and Punish, Michelle Foucault discusses the history and power of the panopticon - a prison arranged with the guards in the center invisible to prisoners, yet able to keep them under constant surveillance.

This prison structure is remarkably effective, and is used in a variety of forms today in our own high-tech corrections system - part of our successful bid to produce some of the finest, most brutal criminal minds on the planet, while at the same time jailing the members of our society with the least political power and money.

Why not turn such an effective control system on the 'normal' civilian population? After all, we just want each other to behave better, right? If this moves the numbers in the right direction, we must be succeeding... And it does.

'People aren't speeding through school zones anymore, so we must be doing the right thing,' we think, the logic being that if we force people to do something 'good' and they do, our means must be justified.

Like Oceana in Orwell's 1984, we believe that if we just raise our standards of conduct and morality a little, everybody will be better off. Let the few who disobey fall through the cracks, while the rest of us live in fear of committing some insignificant act the State believes to be offensive. How else are we to keep each other in line?

Well, fuck that. People need some tolerance and breathing room to be truly free. Creating a safer community isn't worth trading our freedom for - other less destructive means will present themselves if we search for them.

I'll continue to drive safely and follow the speed limit 'cause it's the right thing to do. I'll continue to resent the inappropriate, seemingly inexorable, intrusion of surveillance cameras into my every day life.

And if I get a ticket from photo radar, I'm taking it to the Supreme Court. I suggest you do the same. Let's see what these dystopian social engineers think about 2,000 jury trials.