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Above, Medway residents 'stand out' on Saturday, Oct. 10, to protest local use of Flock cameras. The organizers plan to have similar standouts each Saturday from 10-12 until Town Meeting on November 9. They will also have a session with the ACLU of Massachusetts at the Medway Library on October 26.
To: the Editor
From: James C. Johnston Jr.
Re; Big Brother Might Be Moving to Medway
Dear Sir,
I am made happy by the thought that 400 plus citizens of our neighboring town of Medway fully understand the implications of installing Flock Safety License Plate Readers in their town. These readers would be very effective spies capable of identifying the location of the town’s citizenry, their friends, business associates, love interests, relatives, out-of –town-guests, and just about anyone else one may wish to associate with. To what purpose do we need to know about the location of every sensate creature in our various communities?
Whatever private, public, political, social, family, business, romantic, or any other association we might be enjoying is nobody’s damn business! We have a Constitutional right of “Free Association”. If you haven’t read the Constitution lately, it’s not that long a document, or that confusing to comprehend. It does interesting little things like contain your rights as a citizen of these United States. Maybe that fine old text is worth a revisit, because there are folks loose in the land that might like take those rights of free association away from you someday. There is a lot of funny stuff going on of late just in case you might not have noticed.
But getting back to Medway, and the vigilant folks who live there who also have a clue as to what freedom and Civil Liberties are all about, you might look into just what is unsettling them these days. It seems that somebody, presumably in Medway, got the notion that it might be a good idea to set-up some nice spy equipment called the Flock Safety Automated License Plate Readers about the town so that the “Authorities” could tell just where everybody was. I guess that this is some sort of devise or master-plan to reduce crime and detect the movement of villains in the Greater Medway Community.
Now, I am unaware that Medway has become a hot-bed of criminal activity in the last few years. I checked out Medway’s crime statistics on line, and discovered that it is a nice civilized community, generally inhabited by law abiding people, who get along with each other fairly well. I saw no evidence that a crime wave or growth of a residential criminal element was threatening the tranquility of Greater Medway. I doubt that the citizens of the town need to trade the integrity of their personal freedom of association for extreme measures to discover the location of the town’s citizens any time day or night through the use of a Flock Safety Automated License Plate Reader!
In this land of “A.I.”, or “Artificial Intelligence”, is such a genuine spying object of real concern? I would venture to say, “Yes.” After all, this Flock Safety Automated License Plate Reader, is just another extension of Big Brother which we don’t need in 2026.
About thirty-five years ago, I wrote what I thought at the time was a funny satirical column about a bunch of computers secretly getting together and deciding that Humans were just redundant, inefficient and useless objects that the computers could now dispose of. Somehow, it’s not all that funny anymore. Remember Hal 9000 [Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer] in 2001: Space Odyssey ? Hal was a computer who was very much of that opinion regarding humans. Isn’t it funny how sometimes fiction can become fact? Just think of the writings of Jules Verne in such works as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and his significant catalog of other works of science fiction. Verne’s prognostications, which seemed to be so fantastic in the 19th Century, had a strange way of becoming fact in the 20th and 21st.
No my friends, we don’t need to give Big Brother any more spy tools to undermine our basic freedoms like a Flock Safety Automated License Plate Reader in a free society which we may have to fight to keep as it is. In my youth, I knew people who were alive in this nation before 1865 when human slavery was still a nasty fact of life in this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. As Ben Franklin warned us, freedom is something that has to be actively guarded and protected at all times. If we are not very careful, we might even end-up living in a country where ill-trained masked people, in plain clothes, might ride around in unmarked cars, and armed with guns, who might just randomly grab people off the street because of the color of their skin and generally the way they look!
Johnston is a retired Franklin educator, historian, and author.
