Bob Barr (and this is from 2002, so he doesn't even get into the massive and then-secret NSA stuff):
....I'm intrigued constantly, for example, by reading – particularly here in the District of Columbia but in other major cities across America as well – police chiefs and public officials and mayors clamoring for surveillance cameras. And they say: "Oh, surveillance cameras, we have to have more surveillance cameras." They'll never have enough but they always want more. And it's to "stop crime," it's to "make our citizens safer." Yet, if you were to walk the streets of the city called London, which has more surveillance cameras per capita than any other city in the world (including the old communist nations), if you were to walk the streets of London, you would notice – and this has been borne out by studies—that, despite these thousands upon thousands upon thousands of surveillance cameras that now dot the streets of London, street crime continues to increase. It went up last year by 40%.
And we all, of course, remember – it's seared in our memory banks – the photographs of the terrorists on September 11th boarding the planes, going through security and boarding the planes. There are plenty of surveillance cameras. Surveillance cameras don’t stop crime, particularly the type of insidious crime that is practiced by terrorists. As a matter of fact, many terrorists want their pictures taken as they're about to conduct their deed as proof that they have done what Allah has called them, for example, to do. It does not stop crime.
What it is doing – the prevalence of surveillance cameras, the prevalence of profiling what people read, what they say, how they look at you – is changing the face of how we operate as a society. And I think – of all of the many, many issues with which we are legitimately concerned nowadays, that has to rank right up there at the top. Because, if we allow it to continue any further without stopping – and even trying to roll back – some of this drive toward invading the privacy of American citizens so that, now, when we board an airplane, we have surrendered essentially our freedom to travel to unelected individuals with no law enforcement training whatsoever to look at us … and if they don't like the tie that you're wearing, if they don't like the way you look at them, if they don't like the tone of voice that you use in answering their questions, if you might happen to make a joke about them that's overheard, if you might have a magazine – such as American Rifleman, one of the legitimate publications of the NRA – that they don't like or that makes you a "suspect" … they can arbitrarily, summarily, without any probable cause whatsoever stop you and deny you the basic freedom to travel.
And, of course, all of the attendant freedoms such as to use that ability to travel to see your family, to perhaps practice your right to assemble, to engage in political speech if you happen to be trying to visit a representative, if you have to see your lawyer they are infringing your Sixth Amendment rights …
And whatever it is, they can deny you now. We have given so much power to individuals that we have turned the Fourth Amendment on its head. Not just personally … When you deal personally with individuals, for example, at airports but these surveillance cameras. Virtually every time that I've noticed that a jurisdiction seeks to obtain funds to place surveillance cameras at monuments, at businesses, in high crime areas, on street corners, on roadways, for example … they always tell us "It's not to make money; the cameras really do work; there will be no mistakes; and, crime will drop." But in every instance we have found out that none of those premises are true. The cameras don't work, they are faulty, the people that put together the paperwork and the photographs frequently make mistakes, crime does not drop, and – most insidious – that information that is captured on video goes far beyond (in many instances, we're finding, not in every instance but in many instances) beyond simply photographing the license plate. It photographs the car, it photographs the occupants, it photographs what's inside that car. Gathering evidence.
And what happens to all of that evidence? Who knows? But it goes somewhere and it stays somewhere. I can think back to a host of hearings that we've had in various committees – the Judiciary Committee or the Government Reform Committee – over the last eight years in which we have gathered evidence on individuals that show wrongdoing because they don't realize that simply because you erase something from your computer, your Blackberry or your computer, it's not gone … it's there, somewhere, and it can be retrieved. It's the same with this information that's going into government databases by surveillance cameras or the so-called TIPS program. That's another one: the Terrorist Information something System … TIPS.
The government is moving forward with it, despite their assurance publicly that they're not going to. They are. What happens to all of that information? Somebody happens to come to your house to perform a legitimate operation – show you how to use your VCR or something, your cable is out, they need to read the meters – and they see something. Maybe it's a magazine or a book or a picture.
One of the things that our kids delighted in after September 11th was to get some of these posters of Osama Bin Laden with a target and something underneath, for example, "Wanted Dead or Alive" … others said "Wanted Dead" period.
Well, somebody might see that and misconstrue it. They might think, "Hmmm, Osama Bin Laden sympathizer lives here; I better report this." What the government is doing is they are encouraging people to spy on other citizens and empowering them to make decisions based on absolutely no training whatsoever to report in to the government information that they think indicates that this person that they happen to see – something raised their suspicion – ought to be reported. You probably will never know that it's been reported. But it's there. Information given to the government stays with the government. We don’t get them back.
There's really no such thing as a "temporary" surrender of power to the government and that's particularly relevant now as we face what we're being told is – and may very well be – a perpetual war against terrorism. There's no endpoint. There's no finite point to it. We're not going to have papers signed on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri that ended World War II with Japan. It's going to go on …
Therefore, these bits of privacy, these bits of civil liberties that we're surrendering to the government – or allowing them to take – aren't the sort of thing that they're going to use just for the duration of a four-year war, for example. These things are with them, basically, in perpetuity.
That's why I think it's very legitimate and absolutely essential that the Constitutional questions be asked and the practical questions be asked at the beginning of this process, not at the end. And it's very difficult to get members of Congress to pay attention to these issues. Extremely difficult. Because they don't want to be labeled as "anti-Anti-Terrorism." But now, just as in 1997 and 1998, we people of courage that aren't afraid to raise these issues, to raise these questions and demand that our representatives in the House, the Senate and the Executive Branch – they represent us too, they are our representatives – that they do hear these questions, that they are forced to think about them. So, that if we do as a nation decide that we want national ID cards – something I will never agree to and never support – at least let's go through a process where it's called a National ID Card and not some process as (I think in HR 46-thirty … Tom, are you familiar with this?) …
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