Re: "Victoria's top cop stops impaired driver," Aug. 2.
Chief Jamie Graham is a good cop, as he did what was needed to take an impaired driver off the road. For a while, anyway.
Unfortunately, this "good cop" image is at odds with Graham's support of the RCMP's intention of deploying a massive surveillance system using their licence-plate readers. The licence-plate readers catch "bad guys" all the time, and that's a good thing, but why keep information on people who have done nothing wrong?
Graham wants to keep the data on law-abiding citizens just in case they cease to be law-abiding in the future. He justifies this by saying: "If you haven't done anything wrong and there's no issues, what's to be worried about?"
If that's the criterion, why not start taking pictures of homes, and keep a database with the information of who goes in and out? Maybe a crime will be committed in the future, and all that information will already be available.
The real issue is that the RCMP's proposed system is one more turn in the lossof-privacy screw. Privacy online is almost a joke, and now we see more and more that the same happens with privacy offline.
Julio Miranda
Victoria
