I’m working on a summary of yesterday’s proceedings regarding the City of Manchester’s proposed plans to put up several surveillance cameras downtown. In the mean time, here’s today’s coverage from local media sources…
We want more privacy,” plaintiff Carla Gericke said. “We want the government’s role to be limited and restricted as it’s constitutionally supposed to be. Let’s not turn into a big brother Orwellian surveillance state.”
Gericke, a liberty activist who has sought state and local office, said she would have no issue with a storeowner installing a camera and voluntarily sharing video with police. ‘Everyone’s working together. That’s a decentralized approach,’ she said. ‘What we’re talking about here is a very centralized approach where it’s centralized in one group of people’s hands. We don’t know really what’s going to happen to the data and I think it’s naive to just say we should trust them.’
Carla Gericke, president emeritus of the Free State Project and a Manchester activist who led a protest against the cameras last April outside City Hall. She is concerned about the cameras having a chilling effect on future protests. She questioned whether the cameras would record future protesters and if the police would use the information to make a database of trouble-makers and renegades.