Body cameras and the totalitarian test
Matthew Feeney, discussing police body cameras, describes a range of things that could be done with body camera footage that he calls quite frightening. If footage were never deleted, he says, it would not be hard for a nefarious local government to track citizens through it if facial recognition software were implemented, and body cameras could quickly become a device of a police state. He argues this can be prevented through proper rules and regulation, and that whenever he thinks about law enforcement and new technology he asks what a totalitarian would think of it — whether body cameras, drones or militarized equipment, these are attractive to people who do not care about individual liberty, but with the right rules in place they can be made into tools for the promotion of individual liberty and transparency and accountability Matthew Feeney on Best Practices for Police Body Cameras (2016).
Bob Zadek expands on the point, saying that technology gives government so much power that citizens are to some degree dependent on government not misusing it. A totalitarian state and a free state would have the same technology, and it is the use of the technology that matters; voters are empowering whoever they elect to be at the on-and-off switch of all of it, and all that separates totalitarianism from a free society is how that technology is used. Feeney agrees, noting that people are often distracted by the sexiness of new technology and that he is impressed with it only because of laws — in a different context, he would find it terrifying.
Transparency, cost and the absence of certainty
Terence Kealey, discussing salt and sugar regulation, draws an analogy to the death penalty: people pull back from it not because they disbelieve in it as such but because courts are run by human beings who make mistakes. The same applies to salt and sugar — if we knew absolutely and for certain that these were dangerous, legislation might reasonably follow, as with cyanide, but the question is whether salt and sugar are dangerous, and the answer is that we do not know. He says salt most probably is not dangerous and that the big myths of salt being dangerous have largely been exploded, while sugar probably is dangerous though the data is very strange; regulating or taxing them means making decisions based on imperfect knowledge. His own feeling is that this should be left to consumers and restaurateurs unless there is certainty, like in the case of cyanide. Transparency, yes: if a mayor were to require every menu to give salt, sugar and carbohydrate content, as supermarket products do, that is fine — transparency of information is fine, but transparency of regulation in the absence of certainty means making mistakes “Breakfast is Good For You” and Other Dangerous Government-Sponsored Myths (2018).
Zadek responds that transparency has a difficulty: there is a cost, passed along to the consumer, and to force a consumer to pay for something utterly useless is transparency in a bad way. He cites GMOs, a fight ongoing at the time, noting that Western Europe is fearful of GMOs based upon no science whatever, while any science there is says they are benign and help productivity and feed the world. Disclosures, he concludes, are not free and may be harmful in imposing a cost that nobody benefits from.
Transparency as a governing principle
In a discussion of the Common Sense Party, the fifth of its stated core principles is efficiency of government and transparency of government. The principle is introduced alongside examples offered as evidence of need: checks intended for the stimulus of business after COVID going instead to prisoners in state penitentiaries, billions of dollars unaccounted for in state government, and no-bid contracts under which substantial amounts of government expenditure are allocated without competitive bidding Restoring Common Sense to California (2021).
The same episode frames the party’s broader purpose as empowering the individual and lists the other principles: the fundamental importance of the individual and the opportunity to participate in political activity without signing on to a list of orthodox points of view; that local decisions are better, with parents empowered in decisions regarding education; that government should spend no more than it gets, with the federal government distinguished from state and local units because it can print money; and protection of the environment and other public goods received from parents and passed to the next generation, with reference to externalities. Tom Campbell, addressing the party, says it wants to empower the rest of us and imposes no obligatory adherence to a preset menu. Zadek describes being drawn to the party by its treatment of the relationship between voter and representative, and Campbell adds that having been a Congressman, a State Senator and Finance Director of California, thousands of decisions are made by elected officials about which the public never hears — what you do when no one is looking becomes critical, and that is conscience and integrity.
Academic transparency in education
Matt Beienburg describes academic transparency as an idea his organization has pioneered, under which public schools, as a starting point, should post online a list of what they are using so that parents can know what it is and have that conversation. He notes that in Arizona there is a law on the books requiring a school district that wants to adopt a textbook to make that public so parents can know about it and see it, but that this does not apply to supplemental resources. A district can therefore use material such as the 1619 Project — which he characterizes as teaching that the United States was founded on slavery and that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery — and say it did not have to get permission or even tell parents because it is only a supplemental resource teachers may be encouraged to use Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
Beienburg says the problem is more severe than poor content alone: poor content is used and parents are not even made aware of it. He describes representing parents in Arizona and as far away as Rhode Island who asked their local public school districts to see what was being taught and were told they would have to submit formal public records requests and pay hundreds of dollars for the records. He connects academic transparency to school choice, arguing that as parents become more aware of what is taught in public schools — which they saw during COVID — they become increasingly dissatisfied, and should be empowered either to demand appropriate resources from school boards or to take advantage of an opportunity like an ESA and go somewhere else. Zadek’s framing question in the same segment concerns what might happen to textbook content once many small independent educational customers replace the large statewide purchasers, and he notes that he had invited Beienburg to speculate on that point.
Across episodes: what changes
The topic recurs in four episodes, but the excerpts do not show a single argument developing so much as four distinct settings in which transparency is bounded differently. In the body camera episode, transparency is the desired output of rules governing a technology that would otherwise serve a police state, and the constraint is misuse of government power. In the nutrition episode, transparency of information is endorsed while transparency of regulation is rejected absent certainty, and the constraint is cost imposed on consumers. In the Common Sense Party episode, transparency appears as one item in a list of governing principles, paired with efficiency and illustrated by unaccounted-for funds and no-bid contracts. In the education episode, transparency becomes an affirmative demand on schools to publish what they teach, advanced by Beienburg as academic transparency and tied to school choice. The later treatments do not revisit the earlier ones; no speaker in the excerpts responds to another episode’s argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the jurisdiction or venue of the body camera discussion beyond Feeney’s general remarks, nor the name of any statute or case bearing on footage retention or facial recognition. They do not identify the mayor Zadek refers to by name in the nutrition episode, nor the specific bill or rule imposing menu labeling. The Common Sense Party’s founding date, membership and electoral history are absent, as are the outcomes of any transparency proposal described. The education excerpts do not name the Arizona law on textbook adoption, the Rhode Island districts involved, or the result of the parents’ records requests.