July 31, 2015 1:57 PM

Smith: Welcome to the Videoverse

From the Left: Quorum Report’s liberal columnist Glenn W. Smith argues dash cams, body cams, phone cameras, ubiquitous security cameras bring both good and bad; good, in the case of exposing police violence and other injustices; bad in the case of citizen versus citizen spying and loss of privacy.

It is a new world as law enforcement dash cameras and body cameras reveal a level of police violence, especially against minorities, that has been invisible to the public for far too long.

At the same time, we have the news covering illicit videos made by liars who fraudulently pretend to be people they are not. They set out with hidden cameras to entrap their fellow citizens they consider their enemies. I’m speaking, of course, of the James O’Keefe video storm troops or O’Keefe-inspired dirty tricksters like those recently in the news with their heavily edited Planned Parenthood videos.

They are, in effect, little Nixons mainstreaming dirty tricks into a citizen-versus-citizen racket that destroys trust, weakens society’s bonds and somehow mysteriously captivates the press, which should know better. It’s a mistake to feed these anti-social subterfugers (Can I can coin that word? Maybe spoken with a hard “g”?). If I lied and misled the press as often as these dirty tricksters do, I doubt reporters would even return my phone calls.

The complete column from Glenn W. Smith can be found in the R&D Department.

By Glenn W. Smith