Panopticopolis

The City Assessor is photographing every property in Minneapolis:

The purpose of this project is to help improve the overall quality and accuracy of property appraisals in Minneapolis and to allow the Assessor’s Office to fine tune its property data, by confirming property addresses and other information about the structure/s on a given property.

Additionally, these photographs will have a number of public safety purposes including:

• Documenting graffiti on homes and businesses
• Enhancing emergency preparedness operations with thorough documentation of city properties
• Capturing images of buildings and businesses with “before” pictures in the event of major property damage or loss.

This comprehensive project begins Wednesday, April 21, and will take approximately six weeks to complete.

Google already did this, but at lower resolution. Our City overlords want to be able to read your house number. But there’s no cause for alarm:

Property taxes will not change as a result of this initiative. It is only designed for the purposes of data collection. The photos are for City of Minneapolis internal use only and will not be available in any public venue.

You just can’t parody statists anymore.

Nor can you sufficiently mock the kind of fools who make themselves comfortable with Big Brother peeping in their windows:

The city offers a reasonable explanation. Just me, but given a choice between trusting the city and trusting some corporate entity, I'll side with the city most of the time.

No, honey, it’s not just you. Some may put up a bit more of protest before they’re shuttled into their cages, but the majority of Minneapolis wants to be watched over.

I hold that there is really no such thing as privacy anymore. There are too many cameras and microphones floating around. And storing data gets cheaper every month. Whether it is Mega-Lo Corp or the Nanny State, I expect that I am being surveilled.

But I prefer to be watched by someone who has an interest in meeting my needs or satisfying my desires through voluntary exchange. When I am watched by an entity with a monopoly on violence that operates at the whim of bureaucrats and electeds, I lose a little humanity.

There’s no way my view can be reconciled with the fools’. I did not ask for the illusion of security. I did not volunteer my privacy, my dignity, or my liberty. While I was out trying to build a better life, my neighbors have built a prison for us all.