Lawrence Ben-Eliezer -- Toronto Criminal Lawyer On Police Doing Licence Plate Checks

The future of big brother is now. Check this out:

OK...Here's the thing. The tide of human history has a number of constant features. Among these is the loss of sovereignty at every level of human activity from the national to the individual. The law itself, whether in real estate or drug trafficking, is designed to impose a set of rules that subjugate individual freedom of action to collective needs. The seemingly
eternal struggle between these two competing values has always and will always resemble the nightly activity at your local casino; namely, there may be individuals who walk away with a profit, but the house almost always wins in the end.

Railing against the encroachment of the State on our privacy is long-favoured pastime among social activists, philosophers and criminal defence counsel. I am sure that our counterparts in the 19th century bemoaned those improvements in communication technology (printing, the
telegraph, the telephone, but to name a few) that made the permanent apprehension of criminals easier and easier to accomplish. Similarly, people have always had a deep-seated fear and suspicion of technologies that have the potential to expose what would otherwise be undetectable activity.

We allow police cars to be equipped with enormous horsepower because we want the cops to catch criminals. We have mechanisms for the judicial authorization of intercepted communications because we want the authorities to be aware of criminal activity. We agree to the obligatory attachment of licence plates to vehicles because we want the government to be able to track the ownership of those plates to individuals.

Briefly stated, we agree to these and many other similar conventions because we are prepared to surrender more and more chunks of our sovereignty in order to ensure our collective security and individual safety.

I seem to recall a great howl over the DNA legislation. I still object to DNA orders when I can. Yet the technology itself is as useful to exonerate the innocent as to convict the guilty.

Are we really going to voice genuine concern over police doing searches of license plate numbers? Is this a hill on which we are willing to die? Is it a hill at all, or is it just another excuse to shake our fist at anything resembling state action regardless of the merits?

Submitting Air Miles cards, reward points cards, Esso points cards and the like is a voluntary submission to the institutional gathering of information about our shopping habits. We are not obliged to subscribe to any of those programs. Owning and driving a vehicle, which are privileges rather than rights, carry with them certain legal pre-requisites to which we must all
conform. Such conformity necessarily and predictably leads to the surrender of individual sovereignty. If you don't want the police to track your driving habits, don't drive. If you want to drive, don't scream 'foul' when the police engage in easily predictable and legally authorized activity.

Any technology, law or activity is vulnerable to abuse. There are mechanisms for dealing with such abuse. Let's live with the inevitable and keep moving forward.