Democracy is a beautiful thing. Sometimes it gives you highways and hospitals. Other times, it gives you a local elected official who responds to losing a vote by essentially threatening to confiscate everyone’s phones like a substitute teacher who’s had enough.
In a spectacular display of what political scientists might call “taking your ball and going home,” a town councilmember recently proposed banning internet and phone service after their municipality voted to ban Flock Safety cameras — the automated license plate readers that have become the surveillance equivalent of a Neighborhood Watch, except the neighborhood watch is a robot that never sleeps and remembers every car it’s ever seen.
For the uninitiated, Flock cameras are those sleek little devices that quietly photograph every vehicle that passes by, logging plates and helping law enforcement track movements across a network. Privacy advocates have spent considerable energy raising concerns about exactly what happens to all that data. Apparently, those concerns were persuasive enough that this particular town said “thanks, but no thanks” to the technology.
This is where our protagonist councilmember enters the chat — and immediately loses the plot. Rather than accepting the democratic outcome with grace, they reportedly responded to the camera ban by proposing that the town also ban internet service and mobile phones. The logic being, presumably, that if we’re worried about surveillance and data privacy, we should just… opt out of the 21st century entirely.
It’s the governmental equivalent of “fine, we’ll eat dinner in SILENCE then” after someone complains about the music being too loud.
To be fair, there’s almost certainly a principled point buried somewhere in there — something about consistency in how we think about privacy and technology. But that point got absolutely steamrolled by the delivery, which landed somewhere between “logical paradox” and “I learned about proportional responses from a toddler.”
The proposal has, predictably, not been embraced with widespread enthusiasm.
Local residents can presumably still browse the internet and make phone calls for now, though they may want to do so quietly, lest they further upset the balance of power at the next council meeting.
*Source: 404 Media (via Reddit r/nottheonion)*
Original story via Reddit Not The Onion
