Ron Latz: Big Brother

Last week, Senator Ron “I went to Harvard – I bet you didn’t go to Harvard, did you?” Latz tabled Senator Petersen’s digital privacy bill, likely killing it for the rest of the session.

And yesterday?

For the third consecutive session, lawmakers have sparred over whether LPR “hits” on innocent people should be deleted immediately—what privacy advocates want, or kept for 90 days– what law enforcement wants.

This session, a 90-day retention bill sponsored by Sen Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, over protests from Sen. Branden Petersen, R-Andover, who authored a competing bill arguing for zero retention. While the committee opted not to move forward with Petersen’s bill, Latz’s bill headed to the Senate floor for a vote.

In other words, Sen. Ron “we are all created equal, but some of us are more equal than others” Latz, who also led last sessions push to create a paper trail on all firearms purchases, wants to keep a 90 day record of everywhere everyone has been in a car.

Let’s let that sink in for a little bit; the DFL jammed down legislation that puts the state in charge of all of your personal and health data; they tried their darndest to register the movement of every firearm in the state; they successfully defended one was electronic surveillance; and now, thanks to Sen. Latz, they will have a 90 day record of your travels.

NOD TO POLITICAL REALITY:  It’s entirely possible that Latz has submitted the “90 day retention” bill as  a sop to his police and prosecutor organization benefactors; that he referred it to the Transportation committee to so it gets tabled without Latz’s fingerprints on it; that he’s playing both sides.

I don’t care.

If Senator X submitted a bill calling for the sterilization of black males to fight crime, even at the behest of a big contributor, even knowing that his political maneuvering was going to see that it went nowhere, it’d still be a loathsome bill.

And so is this one.

8 thoughts on “Ron Latz: Big Brother

  1. It would be interesting to see what happens if someone tells Ronnie Hahvahd that they are going to be monitoring his and his family’s every move for the rest of his time in office?

  2. How long will it be before “the authorities” carry devices that interrogate your PCD (personal computing device aka cell phone, iPad & etc) sucking out texts, GPS info, passwords, numbers of your friends PCD’s…anything and everything?

    How long will it be before everyone has such technology?

    What will the world look like when instead of greeting each other with “good morning” or “hi”, we silently stand for a moment while our interactive civil databases are scanned, sorted, cross referenced and stored?

  3. Is there anyone in the leadership of the Democrat-Farmer Labor party who has ever farmed or punched a time clock?

  4. And is it too much to ask for the “authorities” to show us how many crimes have been solved and lives saved by collecting this data? What is the benefit to our society – and does it even come close to outweighing the benefit of people living free from Big Brother – of even collecting this in the first place?

  5. The “Harvard Grad” thing is bad–my brother is one, and in a discussion over the estate tax, would not even admit the possibility that the rich in the U.S. do not generally inherit their wealth. Of course, Stanley and Danko demonstrated that it’s not just a hypothesis, but a fact, in “The Millionaire Next Door.” Like a wag said, you can tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.

    NightWriter also demonstrates the question–one of many I’m sure–Latz doesn’t want to answer. Given that criminals can also be traced by credit card and phone records, and given that criminals will tend to change vehicles to avoid detection, what benefit does the retention of this data provide?

    As Deming (we’ll forgive his Yale degree here) noted, “In God we trust, all others must provide data.” Data, Mr. Latz.

  6. If we record the license plate of every car passing the Wells Fargo bank and keep the data for 90 days, we’ll be able to find the get-away car when the bank is robbed. Also, which political candidate drove past there, at what time of day, and whose wife was driving behind him, equally valuable information and certain to be protected from leaking to the wrong campaign’s operatives.

  7. “Is there anyone in the leadership of the Democrat-Farmer Labor party who has ever farmed or punched a time clock?”

    The image of the difference between today’s 2 main parties……Rod Grams vs Mark Dayton for US Senate in 2000. Story came out about a young Rod Grams getting up at 4:30 AM each morning to milk the cows on the family farm. In his adult life, he collects tractors.

    At the same time, a photo was released (by Dayton I think) of a young Mark Dayton, wearing a ful length fur coat, standing next to a private plane, about to embark on a world trip. Like the idle rich of the gilded age.

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