“COMPTON, Calif. – When sheriff’s deputies here noticed a burst of necklace snatchings from women walking through town, they turned to an unlikely source to help solve the crimes: a retired Air Force veteran named Ross McNutt.

“McNutt and his Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, persuaded the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to use his surveillance technology to monitor Compton’s streets from the air and track suspects from the moment the snatching occurred.

“The system, known as wide-area surveillance, is something of a time machine – the entire city is filmed and recorded in real time. Imagine Google Earth with a rewind button and the ability to play back the movement of cars and people as they scurry about the city.

“’We literally watched all of Compton during the time that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,’ McNutt said. ‘Our goal was to basically jump to where reported crimes occurred and see what information we could generate that would help investigators solve the crimes.'”

A driver in L.A.? Consider yourself guilty by default

Officials’ appetite for knowing everything about everyone is hardly limited to what’s going on in Compton. This is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported on March 19:

“‘Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

“The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that ‘all [license plate] data is investigatory.’ The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter.

“This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under ‘general warrants’ that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.

“ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. This happens without an officer targeting a specific vehicle and without any level of criminal suspicion. The ALPR system immediately extracts the key data from the image — the plate number and time, date and location where it was captured — and runs that data against various hot lists. At the instant the plate is photographed not even the computer system itself — let alone the officer in the squad car — knows whether the plate is linked to criminal activity.

“Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.”

Scary stuff. Remember Lord Acton, everyone: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” To the extent that mass surveillance helps convey a sense of absolute power to those who see the vast information it provides, corruption related to government surveillance is likely to be a staple of our lives from now on.

Great, just great.

State Senators Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, and Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, introduced legislation on Monday that would ban state agencies, officials and corporations that provide services to the state from supporting or assisting the federal government to spy or collect data on Californians, unless the government first obtains a warrant. The lawmakers say that they introduced Senate Bill 828 following “the repeated federal admissions of widespread spying on innocent American citizens.”

“The National Security Agency’s massive level of spying and indiscriminate collecting of phone and electronic data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a direct threat to our liberty and freedom,” Lieu said in a statement announcing the bill's introduction. “Let’s be clear: when the government deliberately violates the Constitution on a mass basis, it poses a clear and present danger to our liberties.”

The bill, which is introduced as an urgency measure, requires two-thirds support in both houses of the Legislature. With Anderson, a prominent conservative Republican as a co-author, it is likely to pick up additional support.

“I support this bill because I support the Constitution, our Fourth Amendment rights and our freedoms to live in the United States of America,” Anderson said.

Response to Snowden revelations

Lieu's legislation comes in response to last summer's revelations by former defense contractor and government whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting phone data on millions of Americans for years.  In December, a federal judge ruled that the “almost-Orwellian” bulk collection of Americans’ phone records is likely unconstitutional.

“The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” Judge Richard Leon wrote in his December ruling.

Later in the month, another federal judge, District Judge William H. Pauley III, ruled in favor of the program, describing it as a key tool in the war on terrorism. That ruling has buoyed the argument on Capitol Hill that such widespread warrantless surveillance is in the interest of national security.

“I would hope that Judge Pauley's opinion will lessen at least some of the adulation for Edward Snowden as well as the rabid anti-NSA hysteria which has become so pervasive,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.

Lieu's military service brings credibility on national security

Supporters of warrantless government surveillance programs, such as King, will have a challenging time lecturing Lieu about national security. That's because Lieu is a decorated member of the armed services. Last year, while on the Legislature's spring break, the lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves was awarded with the Air Force Meritorious Service Medal.

Lieu, who understands national security, recognizes that an unchecked federal government poses a threat to Americans.

“I agree with the NSA that the world is a dangerous place,” Lieu said. “That is why our founders enacted the Bill of Rights. They understood the grave dangers of an out-of-control federal government.”

Tech firms based in California

The bill is expected to have national implications as the biggest names in technology are largely based in California. Silicon Valley-based technology firms could embrace Lieu's bill in a bid to repair their image after many of them have been accused of being complicit in government surveillance.

According to the Guardian, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook cooperated with the NSA spying and were paid millions of dollars for costs incurred from the Prism surveillance program.

State resources shouldn't be used for indiscriminate spying

Some legal experts question whether the bill could survive a challenge from the federal government.

“It is no different from a state saying it would not help the federal government carry out an order to desegregate schools,” Erwin Chemerinsky told the Daily Breeze; he's the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine and shares Lieu's concerns on NSA surveillance,”States cannot interfere with or impede the achievement of a federal objective.”

Lieu says that it comes down to a question of whether state resources should be used on unconstitutional practices.

“State-funded public resources should not be going toward aiding the NSA or any other federal agency from indiscriminate spying on its own citizens and gathering electronic or metadata that violates the Fourth Amendment,” Lieu said.

A national security expert told UT San Diego columnist Steven Greenhut that, even if the legislation is blocked in federal court, it can have a symbolic impact. Last year, Lieu introduced Senate Resolution 16, a measure that urged Congress to stop its unconstitutional practices.

“Even if the bill is in a sense symbolic, it can have a real effect,” Ivan Eland, a national security expert with the Oakland-based Independent Institute, told the UT San Diego.

A 2012 Bloomberg News analysis headlined “The Facebook Effect” laid out the picture:

“The potential for California (STOCA1) to see a tax windfall from a Facebook Inc. public stock offering this year demonstrates how much the state relies on capital-gains taxes, a volatile revenue stream that hampers its credit rating.

“Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, the world’s most- used social-networking site, is considering the largest initial public offering for an Internet company on record, a person familiar with the plans said last year. Estimated at $10 billion, the offering would make instant millionaires of company employees and require the state to adjust its revenue forecast to reflect additional capital-gains taxes they’d pay, the state’s legislative analyst said yesterday.

“That kind of unanticipated boost shows the boom-and-bust cycle that capital gains taxes often inflict on California’s budget. In fact, capital-gains tax revenue as a percentage of the state’s general fund plummeted from 12 percent to just 3 percent between 2007 and 2009 as investors pulled away from the stock market, a decline of $9.3 billion, according to state finance department figures.”

'I can’t imagine foreign buyers trusting American products'

This reliance on capital gains could haunt the Brown administration and the Legislature in short order if the NSA scandal keeps damaging the reputation of Facebook and other California industry giants like Google, Yahoo and Twitter. A Tuesday report on Forbes.com has some context:

“Princeton technologist Ed Felten — who used to be government-employed at the Federal Trade Commission — writes, 'This is going to put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage, because people will believe that U.S. companies lack the ability to protect their customers—and people will suspect that U.S. companies may feel compelled to lie to their customers about security.'

“'I can’t imagine foreign buyers trusting American products,” says security expert Bruce Schneier. 'We have to assume companies have been co-opted, wittingly or unwittingly. If you were a company in Sweden, are you really going to want to buy American products?'

“Earlier this summer, technology analyst Daniel Castro authored a report suggesting that revelations about corporate cooperation with the government through programs like PRISM would take a toll on cloud computing businesses to the tune of $22 to $35 billion over the next three years 'if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits.'”

This backlash is well under way. Facebook, Google and Yahoo are begging the Obama administration to be allowed to reveal the extent of their cooperation with the NSA. Whether or not the White House agrees, the corporate titans are sending a message to the world that things aren't as bad as they may seem. Are they telling the truth? Who knows?

But they know what the perception is. It's why Google is also taking other decisive steps to address its image problem. This is from the weekend Washington Post:

“Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments, company officials said Friday.

“The move by Google is among the most concrete signs yet that recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts have provoked significant backlash within an American technology industry that U.S. government officials long courted as a potential partner in spying programs.”

Jerry Brown and state lawmakers better wish Google good luck, and Yahoo and Facebook, too. Otherwise, the fallout from the largest spying scandal in world history could buffet state budgets for decades to come.

Maybe this will finally end the inexplicably blithe reaction most Californians have to the fact that their government is spying illegally on millions of Americans with the coerced assistance of the Golden State's tech giants.

He attacked potential opponents, meaning especially Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, with being out of touch with voters. “”I think we have some folks who think we have to be college professors,” he said. “For our ideas to win we have to govern. And if we don’t win we don’t govern.”

Except that his potential opponents — Paul, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindahl, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, etc. — all are as much “winners” as he his.  They won their last elections.

We don’t know yet what the key issues will be in 2016. Look back to 2005 and remember what the issues were then, compared to the actual issues of the 2008 election: the Hurricane Katrina relief disaster, the economic collapse of Sept. 2008, the slide downward of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.

But Christie already is on the wrong side of what almost certainly will be a key issue in 2016: What I call the Stasi SuperSnooper State. The revelations of NSA violations of our Fourth Amendment rights against “unreasonable searches and seizures” just keep coming. Even as Christie was speaking, the Washington Post revealed new information from whistleblower Edward Snowden on how the NSA’s own internal audits revealed pervasive abuse of personal privacy “thousands of times.”

Yet the issue Christie currently is best known for is defending the NSA, while attacking Paul for defending privacy. Christie, acting as if he were at the 2004 GOP convention, even brought up the specter of 9/11. Unless every American is spied on relentlessly, he held, we could be attacked again by terrorists. Put another way: Only by destroying our freedoms can we remain free.

Winning platform

But as Paul understands, the winning platform is to embrace restoring our Fourth Amendment protections. A “strange bedfellows” coalition has formed to do just that, including libertarian conservatives like Paul and left-wing progressives like the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who broke the original Snowden revelations and so much more. Dating back to the Bush regime, Greenwald has been America’s most stalwart journalistic defender of the Bill of Rights.

On the other side are the Establishments of both parties, who consider Snowden a traitor: On the Left, there’s President Obama, obviously, who wants to extradite Snowden and put him in a cage, along with Attorney General Eric Holder and many Democrats and “progressives.”

On the Right are Christie and the GOP leadership in Congress. Former Vice President Dick Cheney branded Snowden a “traitor.”

Yet Americans are on Snowden’s side, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll. And in particular, the young people the Republicans say they want to attract — and whom they obviously need to win future elections — think Snowden is “some kind of Jason Bourne,” as even the anti-Snowden Sen. John McCain conceded.

The 2016 Democratic nominee almost certainly will have to side with President Obama and against Snowden. Although Obama’s popularity has been dropping nationally, he remains wildly popular among most Democrats. Bucking him in 2016 on this issue would be difficult.

So Republicans have a ready-made issue for them: Backing the restoration of the Fourth Amendment and opposing the Obama police state.

Because Christie is a on Obama’s side, the governor will go noplace fast in the GOP primaries.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — Some fundamentalist Christians take the “Greatest Story Ever Told” and make it so unpalatable that it sends seekers running in the other direction. Likewise, some of my fellow liberty lovers take the greatest political and economic system ever devised and make it sound so parsimonious that it causes people run for some government agency.

Last week, on Independence Day, we celebrated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, but what we really were celebrating was the unique vision upon which our society was founded, even if it isn’t always “sold” to the public in an easily understood and appealing way.

There are two basic visions of society. In the one that dominated human societies throughout most of history, a small group of people impose their will on everyone else by the threat of violence. Submit or be imprisoned, re-educated, killed or expelled. The leaders have unlimited and ultimate authority, although such governments vary by degree of awfulness. Not every authoritarian system is run by Khmer Rouges or Visigoths.

In the other vision, all people — by the nature of their birth — have fundamental rights. The government’s only job is to protect those rights. The State is designed to serve as a referee to assure that people don’t rob, defraud or otherwise harm others; to sort out the inevitable disputes that result given the human condition; and perhaps to provide some services (i.e., infrastructure) not easily provided by the private sector.

Flawed, but still very much worth celebrating

Those who are unduly critical of American society are missing the key point. Of course, the founding fathers were hypocritical and human. Of course, our society falls short of its ideals. Of course, we no longer are really free. Try to defy the government’s edicts and you will feel no safer than Edward Snowden, the asylum-seeking (Venezuela or Russia, anyone?) former defense contractor who had leaked embarrassing documents about NSA spying programs.

But looking at the course of human history, it has been the rarest society that has tried to follow the second course. Why does the United States remain among the most prosperous and harmonious nations on Earth? It’s not because of the IRS, Obamacare, the FBI or any other government agency or program. It’s because of the free-market system, combined with a political system that checks and balances the power of the authorities. This is such a sure-fire creator of wealth and happiness that we do well even running on its fumes.

That’s worth celebrating, even though this system’s successes are not enough for those many people who turn to that thing called government to give them whatever it is they want. But, as the old saying goes, any government big enough to give you whatever you want also is big enough to take away everything you’ve got.

Critics of the free market argue that it’s based on greed, but let’s compare, on a personal level, how markets and the government work. The public school system, for instance, is a government-funded and controlled monopoly. Let’s say your kids are in terrible schools and you want them to be taught somewhere else.

You have three basic choices: Pay a second tuition (you’ve already paid the first one through your taxes) and send them to a private school. Move to another community with a better school district. Spend your time ousting the current school board, overcoming well-funded union opposition and electing new members who might hire better administrators. That could consume your entire life and there’s virtually no chance of success.

Let’s say the schools operated in a market system. The fix is simple. You would shop around for better schools and possibly have the problem solved by the weekend. If you don’t like what General Motors offers in its car product, you don’t devote yourself to changing the company’s board and reviving its product line. You go to the auto mall and buy a Dodge or a Toyota.

Democracy and free markets: making distinctions

Free markets are about voluntary exchange. You and I negotiate over the price of things. If we don’t agree on terms, we part ways as friends or perhaps enemies, but we can’t force the other person to submit to our terms or else we end up in prison.

I’m ruminating about markets and not about “democracy.” Democracy probably is a better way of electing leaders than by hereditary monarchy or military junta, but it refers only to the way that leaders come to power. I would rather live under a king in a system with the rule of law and due process than in a democracy where the majority was keen on the Muslim Brotherhood.

We should resolve to explain the importance of our freedoms to our friends and neighbors in a kind and personal way. Free societies are prosperous, fair and humane. That’s what was worth celebrating last week amid the fireworks and parades.

Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Write to him at steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.