Dear Editor: Keep Montana Private Life PRIVATE

Dear Editor,

The writer of last week's Op-Ed attacked Montana's STUPID laws regarding traffic cameras. I must respond.

In my life, I have served as a member of the Montana Legislature a total of fourteen years. An area of greatest concern to me has always been protecting our citizens' right to privacy. Traffic cameras are an unacceptable invasion of that privacy. When you leave your home in the morning, where you go and what you do for the rest of the day is nobody's business but your own. Surveillance societies like communist China or the brutal religious dictatorship in Iran have no place in the USA.

The writer praises London, Denver, and other places for the thousands of cameras that watch the people all the time.

I have been in London once. The cameras were very much in evidence. You knew you couldn't even blow your nose without a bureaucrat watching you do it on TV. You couldn't pay me to live in such a place.

Same for Denver, where they have the cameras all over. Plus, they have a toll road where you are supposed to stop and drop money into a slotted container every so often. Of course, there is a camera at each of those places trying to get a picture of your license plate. If it decides you didn't leave the right amount of money or didn't stop at all, you receive a letter demanding money, or else. Sometimes the license plate number is not clear in the picture. Maybe the state isn't even clear, but you can get a demand letter for a traffic violation at a place you have never been. Americans have a Constitutional right to confront their accuser when charged with a violation. When you are stopped by a police officer, you automatically face your accuser. With cameras, there is no identifiable accuser, but you will keep getting letters demanding money.

Be thankful for a Legislature in Montana that values your right to privacy more than it wants to squeeze every possible dollar out of you. When candidates for the Legislature come by asking for votes, it might be a good idea to remind them that you like, and wish to keep, your right to privacy without having everything you do and every place you go recorded by cameras.

Before the law was passed prohibiting cameras in Montana, the city of Bozeman was considering adopting a traffic camera system. I told some businesspeople in Bozeman that if they went for the cameras, I would spend my money elsewhere. Let us all firmly demand the right to keep our private life PRIVATE.

TERRY MURPHY

Cardwell, Montana