Cameras at Intersections

Re letter published Feb. 10 expressing approval for law enforcement cameras at intersections.

It is obvious to me that this letter writer hasn’t thought the matter through, considering the possibilities for growing and compounded abuses.

No sensible person approves of people running red lights or stop signs. But using Orwellian methods like cameras to record offenders, while seemingly a mild and innocuous way of dealing with the problem, is at best an arrogant and at worst a sinister answer with far-reaching implications.

Once cameras are allowed for one purpose, it’s only a matter of time before they’re used for something else. How long will it be before they are installed in our libraries for the same purpose? (After all, people might be tempted to steal the books.) How long before they’re all over the public beaches? (Preventing dangerous horseplay.) The trend is irreversible.

Our civil rights are under constant, unrelenting attack by forces that want to dominate and control our every action and thought for their own power or profit.

If my rights are to be taken away and I am to be monitored like so much troublesome inventory, let it be by other people, not machines that remove the watchers from the watched, dehumanizing the process ever further, creating the conditions for the haves and have-nots, the big people and little people, the us and them.

ROGER OSBORNE, Ojai