Last night, I spoke on a really cool anti-surveillance panel with people from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ACLU of Southern California and Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. It was hosted by Restore The Fourth Los Angeles.
I love speaking at events with Hamid Kahn of StopLAPDSpying. Where I’m usually considered the radical, Hamid keeps me in check. And he did – again – last night. When I was speaking about our work to support state bills that give significant restrictions on the use of drones for surveillance by law enforcement, Hamid pointed out, basically, if you give them an inch, they’ll end up taking a mile. In other words, no “restrictions” are good enough. Only an outright ban, because they cannot be trusted with the technology.
Afterwards, I had a chat with a reporter from PandoDaily who had been tweeting very negatively about me and the Tenth Amendment Center for the past day.
He didn’t introduce himself as a reporter, just wanted to “chat.” I assume he was trolling me, because that’s usually how they do it.
But, I obliged. It was a fun and interesting chat. All-in-all, a good evening.