Consent Withdrawn

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Declaration of Independence, 1776

Those words are among the most important in the American political tradition.

The Declaration of Independence does not say that government derives its just powers from its own judgment. It does not say that power becomes legitimate because officials believe it would be useful, because a vendor promises greater efficiency, or because new technology makes an old restraint inconvenient.

It says that the just powers of government come from the people.

That principle stands at the center of Easton’s debate over automatic license plate reader surveillance.

The people of Easton were never asked whether we consented to a system that records vehicles traveling through our community, converts those observations into searchable information, and makes that information available for government use.

Our consent was not requested.

It was assumed.

We are now making clear that assumption was false.

Government power requires legitimacy

Government can possess the physical ability to do something without possessing the moral authority to do it.

A government may have the equipment necessary to monitor people. It may have the money to purchase the equipment, employees capable of operating it, and vendors willing to maintain it. None of those facts answer the essential question:

By what right does government exercise that power over the people?

The Declaration supplies the American answer.

Government exists to secure the rights of the people, and its just powers are derived from their consent. The word just is critical. A power may exist in practice while remaining unjust in its origin or application.

The ability to conduct surveillance does not create the right to conduct surveillance.

A signed contract does not settle the question. A purchase order does not settle the question. An administrative decision does not settle the question.

Those things may establish that government acted. They do not establish that government acted with the informed consent of the people whose movements are being recorded.

Silence is not consent

The public cannot object to a government program it does not know exists.

It cannot meaningfully evaluate a surveillance system without being told what the system collects, how it operates, how long records are retained, who may search them, which agencies may obtain access, and what safeguards limit its use.

When those facts are not presented clearly before deployment, the absence of immediate public opposition cannot honestly be described as consent.

Silence may mean that people were unaware.

It may mean that the decision received little public attention.

It may mean that residents did not understand the technology or its reach.

It may mean that a government action was treated as an ordinary administrative purchase when it actually created a new surveillance capability.

What silence does not necessarily mean is permission.

Government does not acquire the consent of the governed by quietly installing the machinery of surveillance and waiting to see whether anyone notices.

Consent must have substance. At a minimum, it requires that the people understand the nature of the power being exercised in their name.

A public street is not a blank check

Driving on a public street means that a vehicle may be seen by other people. It does not follow that the driver has consented to systematic government identification, recording, storage, analysis, or retrospective searching.

A passing observation and an institutional surveillance system are not the same thing.

A person standing beside the road may see a vehicle pass. That observation is temporary and limited by ordinary human memory. A networked license plate reader can transform the same moment into a durable government record associated with a particular vehicle, time, and place.

The difference is not merely the presence of a camera.

The difference is the creation of a system.

That system can make thousands or millions of individual observations searchable in ways that no ordinary observer could replicate. It allows information collected without suspicion at one moment to be retrieved and examined later.

The public nature of a road does not erase the political question created by that capability.

The government must still explain why it should possess the power, how the power will be limited, and where the people granted their consent.

Elections are not unlimited consent

Some may argue that residents consent through elections. Elected officials are authorized to make decisions on behalf of the community, and not every municipal purchase can be submitted to a public vote.

That is true as far as it goes.

Representative government requires elected officials to exercise judgment. But an election is not a blank check authorizing every future expansion of government power, particularly when the nature and consequences of that power were never presented to voters.

A vote for a mayor or council member cannot reasonably be interpreted as advance consent to every surveillance technology that may later become available.

Representative authority remains accountable to the people from whom it is derived. When a government adopts a power that materially changes the relationship between residents and the state, the public retains the right to question that power, oppose it, demand its repeal, and establish limits that future officials must obey.

That is not a rejection of representative government.

It is representative government functioning properly.

Consent must be informed

Consent without knowledge is not meaningful consent.

Before the public could reasonably evaluate an automatic license plate reader system, residents would need clear answers to basic questions:

• What information does each device collect?
• Does the system collect anything beyond license plate images and vehicle characteristics?
• How long is each record retained?
• Who may search the records?
• What standard must be met before a search is performed?
• Are searches audited?
• Are residents notified when the system is misused?
• Can other police departments or government agencies access Easton’s records?
• Can Easton search information collected by cameras in other jurisdictions?
• Can federal agencies obtain access?
• Is information shared automatically or only after a specific request?
• What prevents the system from being used for purposes unrelated to serious crimes?
• What happens when a plate is misread?
• What remedy exists for a person harmed by an error?
• Can the vendor change the system’s capabilities after installation?
• Can future officials expand the system without returning to the public?
• Can the records be combined with other databases to reconstruct a person’s activities or associations?

These are not technical footnotes.

They define the power being exercised.

A town cannot claim meaningful public consent while the public lacks clear answers to the most basic questions about the surveillance conducted in its name.

Consent cannot be manufactured through procurement

Government procurement is not public consent.

A contract may show that certain officials approved a purchase. It may show that money was appropriated or that an agency followed an internal process. It does not prove that the governed knowingly authorized the underlying power.

This distinction is especially important when government purchases technology from a private company.

A vendor has an interest in selling its product. It may emphasize speed, convenience, investigative leads, or the number of other jurisdictions using the same system. But widespread adoption does not answer the moral and political question.

A surveillance power does not become legitimate merely because it is commercially available or increasingly common.

Nor can government outsource its responsibility by placing the data, software, or infrastructure in private hands. When information is collected for government purposes and made available for government searches, the use of a private vendor does not remove the public character of the surveillance.

The responsibility remains with the officials who approved it and the government that uses it.

Public safety does not eliminate consent

Supporters of surveillance often present public safety as if it ends the discussion.

It does not.

Public safety is an important responsibility of government, but it is not the only responsibility. Government must pursue safety while remaining within legitimate limits. Otherwise, nearly any expansion of state power could be justified by identifying some possible benefit.

The Declaration does not say governments derive their just powers from the promise of safety. It says governments are instituted to secure rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That formulation rejects the false choice between liberty and legitimate government. Government is not legitimate despite individual rights. Securing those rights is the reason government is instituted in the first place.

The relevant question is therefore not simply whether automatic license plate readers might help an investigation.

The relevant questions are broader:

• Does the benefit justify recording everyone?
• Is suspicion directed toward a particular person, or is information collected from the entire public?
• Are there less intrusive ways to accomplish the same legitimate objective?
• What limits prevent a narrowly described tool from becoming a permanent system of routine monitoring?
• Who decides when the system expands?
• What happens when political leadership changes?
• Would we willingly give the same power to officials we deeply distrust?

A free society does not judge government power solely by imagining its best possible use by its most responsible possible operator.

It also considers error, abuse, expansion, political change, and the natural tendency of temporary powers to become permanent.

Consent is not the absence of resistance

There is a dangerous inversion in the idea that a surveillance program is legitimate unless enough residents organize to stop it.

Under that theory, government may act first, disclose later, and treat continued operation as approved until the public overcomes the time, expense, and institutional difficulty of reversing it.

That places the burden on the wrong party.

The people should not have to prove that they withheld consent from a power they were never meaningfully asked to authorize.

The government claiming the power should be able to demonstrate its legitimacy.

It should be able to show that the public was informed, that the proposed system was clearly explained, that meaningful debate occurred before deployment, that enforceable limits were established, and that residents had a genuine opportunity to object.

When those things did not occur, officials cannot point to public silence as proof of approval.

The failure to resist an undisclosed or poorly understood policy is not the same as consenting to it.

Consent may be withdrawn

Even when government authority has been legitimately granted, the people retain the right to reconsider how that authority is exercised.

That principle is inseparable from self-government.

Public policies are not permanent merely because a previous council approved them. Contracts do not place government powers beyond democratic judgment. Technologies do not acquire political rights simply because they have already been installed.

The people may learn more.

They may see consequences that were not previously understood.

They may decide that a power is broader than they were led to believe.

They may conclude that the risks outweigh the claimed benefits.

They may establish a clear rule that neither current nor future officials are permitted to use a particular method of surveillance.

This campaign is an exercise of that authority.

We are not conceding that Easton ever obtained informed public consent for automatic license plate reader surveillance. We are saying that any consent officials believe they inferred from public silence can no longer be claimed.

The public is speaking now.

This is not a demand for a single veto

Consent of the governed does not mean that every individual must personally approve every law or government action. A community could not function under a rule requiring unanimous approval for every decision.

But rejecting an individual veto does not make public consent meaningless.

Consent is expressed through constitutional limits, elections, public deliberation, ordinances, legislation, petitions, protest, and the continuing ability of the people to direct or restrain those acting in their name.

DeFlock Easton is seeking a clear and lawful exercise of local self-government: an ordinance prohibiting automatic license plate reader surveillance in Easton.

That is how a community turns a political principle into an enforceable limit.

The goal is not to ask officials for a temporary promise that the system will be used responsibly. Personnel change. Policies change. Vendors change. Technology changes. A promise made by one administration does not bind the next.

An ordinance establishes the rule itself.

It says that this is not a power the Town may exercise, regardless of who holds office, which department requests it, or which company offers the equipment.

The proper response is prohibition

Once the people have expressly rejected a surveillance power, the proper government response is not another private assurance, revised policy, shorter retention period, or promise of careful use.

Those measures preserve the power.

The question before Easton is whether the Town should possess this surveillance capability at all.

DeFlock Easton’s answer is no.

We do not want government creating a routine record of vehicles traveling through our community.

We do not want participation in a wider network that makes local observations available for searches beyond the immediate time and place in which they were collected.

We do not want the privacy of every driver made dependent on internal rules that government itself may revise.

We do not want a system aimed at the entire public merely because information about a small number of people may later become useful.

We want the cameras removed and the power prohibited by law.

We are the governed

The phrase “consent of the governed” is sometimes repeated so often that its challenge to political power is forgotten.

It identifies who holds the original authority.

Not the vendor.

Not the police department.

Not the town administration.

Not the mayor.

Not the council.

The governed.

Public officials exercise delegated power. They do not own it. They are entrusted with authority for limited purposes, and they remain answerable to the people who granted that authority.

When officials exceed what the public is willing to authorize, the people have the right to correct them.

When government adopts a surveillance power without meaningful public consent, the people have the right to reject it.

When silence has been interpreted as permission, the people have the right to speak clearly.

That is what we are doing.

Consent withdrawn

The people of Easton were not asked whether we consented to automatic license plate reader surveillance.

Our lack of immediate opposition was treated as approval.

Our silence was interpreted as permission.

It was neither.

We do not consent to government recording the movements of every vehicle that passes an automatic license plate reader, regardless of whether its driver is suspected of a crime.

We do not consent to those records being stored, searched, analyzed, or shared through a wider surveillance network.

We do not consent to the expansion of this system.

We do not consent to its continued operation.

Our consent was never requested.

It was only assumed.

That assumption is now withdrawn.

Take action

DeFlock Easton exists for a specific purpose: to stop the deployment of automatic license plate reader surveillance and secure an ordinance banning it in Easton.

If you oppose mass vehicle surveillance:

1. Contact the mayor and members of the Easton Town Council.
2. Attend Town Council meetings.
3. Ask when and how public consent for the system was obtained.
4. Demand removal of the existing cameras.
5. Demand an ordinance prohibiting future deployment.

Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

The governed are speaking.

Sources

1. National Archives, “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription”.
2. National Archives, “The Declaration of Independence”.
3. Founders Online, National Archives, Thomas Jefferson’s original Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence.