In a story that perfectly straddles the line between ‘legal protest’ and ‘extremely illegal,’ an Air Force engineer has been accused of personally dismantling 13 police surveillance cameras, reportedly because he found them — and we’re going to need you to sit down for this — unconstitutional.
Now, most people who have strong feelings about police surveillance cameras express those feelings through strongly-worded letters to local representatives, heated Facebook posts, or perhaps an earnest conversation at a dinner party that makes everyone uncomfortable. This particular engineer, apparently blessed with both the technical know-how and the audacity that only years of military training can provide, opted for a more hands-on approach.
Thirteen cameras. One by one. Gone.
To be fair, the debate around public surveillance cameras and Fourth Amendment protections is a genuinely complex legal conversation that constitutional scholars have been wrestling with for decades. Courts have issued mixed rulings on whether ubiquitous police camera networks constitute unreasonable searches of public spaces. So the man isn’t entirely wrong that there’s an argument to be made.
He’s just making it with bolt cutters instead of a brief.
There’s something almost poetically on-brand about an engineer approaching a civil liberties grievance as though it were a technical problem requiring a technical solution. Camera up? Camera comes down. Repeat thirteen times. Problem solved. The Constitution is saved.
Authorities, displaying considerably less enthusiasm for this particular form of constitutional scholarship, have charged him accordingly. His legal team will now presumably make the very arguments in court that he was apparently too impatient to wait for someone else to make.
The cameras, for their part, could not be reached for comment — largely because they no longer exist.
*Source: Military.com via Reddit r/offbeat*
Original story via Reddit Offbeat
