DAVID MARCUS: China trip a glimpse into the surveillance state America must never become

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Watching Bret Baier live from Beijing this week, you couldn’t help but be stunned at his ‘Special Report’ team’s coverage of the surveillance state in China. It’s scary.

Baier reported that in China, if you jaywalk, or ride a scooter without a helmet, cameras capture it and almost instantly you get a ticket on your phone. In fact, Baier’s own driver received one after illegally parking for just a couple of minutes.

It brings up an important question for Americans, because our government has every bit the capability, and most of the equipment in place to enforce such laws so aggressively. If that happened, would America still be America?

American society has a lot of unofficial wiggle room in such things. No tickets are given for double parking in New York City during street cleaning, even though it’s illegal. Everyone on I-95 is going at least 5-15 miles above the speed limit. And as for jaywalking, most American cities have basically instituted a de facto Manifest Destiny of the intersection.

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This somewhat gentle and relaxed enforcement of laws that do not pertain to violence or rise to the level of felony, explains why every state has bizarre old laws still on the books that are simply never enforced.

In Delaware, it is illegal to sell pet fur. In Massachusetts, swearing at sporting events is a minor crime. In Minnesota, you can be charged with using a greased pig in a contest. The reason these laws were never repealed is that we just stopped enforcing them and nobody cared.

But what happens if every time a law is passed, it comes with an AI-driven surveillance regime that is capable of detecting almost every violation that takes place? How many speeding tickets did you actually deserve this year, according to the letter of the law?

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Much of this is cultural. I recall being in Tokyo in 2019, even before tickets could magically appear on your phone, and on a pencil straight, one-lane street, dozens of people on both sides stood waiting to cross. I was mystified, I remember thinking, “It’s right there. We can make it. This isn’t storming Omaha beach.”

But for the Japanese, a rule is a rule. You follow it.

Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shake hands while looking at each other in front of stone steps.

The concern that we should have about the radical increase in the surveillance state in the United States is that it may make our American culture more like South Asian culture, and that is too high a price to pay for safety and order.

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The wiggle room described above along with, let’s face it, a healthy dollop of disdain for authority, is as American as apple pie. In fact, it can almost serve as a kind of fourth branch of government when people en masse just ignore silly laws.

For as bad as the COVID lockdowns were, and for all the horrible calls from progressives at the time for us to be more compliant, like the Chinese, we did see millions of Americans just disobey ridiculous restrictions.

This defiant spirit is central to who we are as a nation, and we need to think about both how much surveillance we have and how our government might choose to use it.

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Given our devices, TVs, Ring door cameras, plus all the state surveillance out there, the tools are in place. So far, our government isn’t using it to control us. They could easily flip a switch and go totalitarian anytime they want.

The means of state surveillance in our society that seemed like science fiction just a generation ago, aren’t going anywhere. That is a losing argument akin to lying in front of a bulldozer to save a tree.

The real debate will be over how much latitude we give the state, not just to use technology to surveil us, but to punish us for transgressions of minor laws. This is a real challenge because Black’s Law Dictionary has no definition of “wiggle room.”

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Do we want to live in an America where a human cop can make a judgment to give you a warning instead of a ticket, or a one where a Robocop simply enforces the letter of the law?

Americans, it seems to me, prefer the wiggle room. But how to protect it, well, that is a very challenging question.

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