I recently appeared on Real News with David Knight to talk about the lawsuit the city of Lexington, Ky., filed against me over an open records requests.
To open the interview, I explained exactly why the city sued me. One of the highlights of the segment was when I pulled out a copy of a redacted document that police did turn over to me. It perfectly illustrated just how much the government tries to hide from the people it supposedly “works for.”
After we discussed the lawsuit and We See You Watching Lexington’s goal of ensuring the city operates all of its surveillance programs with oversight and transparency, the conversation shifted to a more general discussion about privacy and government spying. I emphasized that the distinction between local and federal law enforcement has become blurred almost to the point of non-existence and talked about how addressing surveillance at the local level also has a major impact on federal spying.
“What we always say at the Tenth Amendment Center is if there is no data, then it can’t get dumped into a system. So, if you can limit data collection at the local and state level, that keeps it from getting dumped into the federal databases and it inhibits the surveillance state. So, it;’s extremely important, not just here in Lexington, Kentucky, but in Frankfort, Kentucky, and Washington D.C. and across the nation.”
