Just this week..

an assembly committee in California passed SB21 and this bill is seeking to make changes in requiring law enforcement agencies to obtain permission from the state first before they engage in using, or go about obtaining, surveillance technology to spy on the public and violate their privacy rights. Specifically, it seeks to establish transparency over all police surveillance technology purchases and policies of those technologies.

The passage of the bill seems somewhat unnecessary seeing as there is already the legal requirement of police needing to obtain appropriate legal permission before spying on whoever they would like to, in any way that they would like to. Obtaining the “proper permission" is and always has been in adherence with the concept of due process and it should already be a Constitutionally-protected right via the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Despite restrictions in place to try and prevent that sort of abuse of power, it's been going on for many years regardless. And because of the growing concern for the seemingly unchecked abuse of authority, we get bills like this one coming around where lawmakers are seemingly trying to reinforce what should be already considered basic policing guidelines.

The new bill is seeking to limit unchecked use of surveillance technology and the new changes are also going to require police departments to construct a policy use guideline for every different type of surveillance technology that they use in order to collect information for their cases. That policy will then need to be approved by a regulatory policing body, and there would be a hearing over the policy that would be open to the public.

If the changes are not accepted then it's alleged that the associated police department of that policy that was rejected would need to then cease working with that surveillance technology.

The bill, which was introduced in Santa Clara County, has already passed the Senate and now the assembly, despite some strong opposition from law enforcement. The police say that if they have to disclose the information about their programs then it will compromise the usefulness of them, a commonly regurgitated excuse by authority figures when it comes to the public seeking more transparency over their actions.

The people in the community want to know what technology is being used and they should have every right to know what the police are doing. After all, the police ultimately work for the state and the state works (ideally) for the people. Therefore, shouldn't the state then answer to the will of the citizenry that it claims to reap its authority from? But they always seem rather reluctant to.

If fully implemented, the new changes related to the new bill would take place in the summer of 2018 and it would require law enforcement agencies to periodically make reports concerning their actions with the surveillance technology, among the other changes mentioned above.

The changes would also prevent the agencies from selling or sharing any of the collected information to third parties.

If they aren't going to pay attention to the Constitution, which is supposed to be regarded as the “supreme law of the land” then what are the chances that these new rules are going to effectively reign in any corruption and abuse of authority with surveillance technology? We'll have to see what unfolds and wait to see if the bill even reaches full passage.

As is tradition, the bill does make a special exception for “exigent circumstances” so that the police can still use surveillance technology without that technology having met the specified transparency requirements.

Sometimes there just isn't time to go through those pesky checks and balances.

SB21 still needs to make it through the Assembly Committee and advocates of the bill will be paying special attention to see if any amendments are made before trying passing the bill further through the legislative process.