Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright.com.

Porter Wright.

inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org The campaigns for the top races on this fall's ballot are heating up.

And there's new focus on flock cameras.

And privacy advocates say it's about time.

That's this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

As summer starts to wind down, the campaigns for governor and U.S.

senator are ramping up with two hot issues leading the way.

This week, Democratic candidate for governor Amy Acton reiterated what Democrats have long campaigned on that Ohio has one of the most corrupt state houses in the country.

Acton says she'll sign three executive orders to fight that, establishing an anti-corruption task force to conduct audits and make recommendations on how to prevent financial abuse of public funds.

Banning lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who have been involved with organizations regulated by Ohio agencies from serving on their boards within three years, as well as more disclosure of appointees and creating a public database of state contracts.

The issues all hands are facing are the costs of everyday living.

Everyone's working harder than they've ever worked.

There is no breathing room and they want to hear real solutions.

They're not much caring about party.

We're seeing people show up.

It doesn't know party, but they're longing for us to address the cost of housing, of electric bills, a property taxes, going up of child care.

And today we're talking about the cost of corruption, the fact that one of the reasons amongst the many that our electric bills have gone up or did for quite a while, is because of a very huge scandal.

It is time that we have good public servants and not have the reputation of being the most house in this country.

We need good people who want to solve the problems of our everyday lives, and it doesn't matter what party they are.

I'm going to work with anyone who wants to actually solve problems of Ohioans instead of make them.

Acton also said she plans, quote, immediate tax relief for everyday working Ohioans instead of people at a million plus end quote.

Tax cuts have been a major point for Republican Vivek Ramaswami, who visited the feast of the Assumption in Cleveland's Little Italy neighborhood over the weekend and then talked to reporters about a keystone of his campaign eliminating the state income tax, which brought in $11 billion last fiscal year.

But we're not going to do it recklessly, and we're not going to do it immediately.

We've laid out a clear plan to steady step, stair step our way down.

And one of the areas where I want to give credit to our current leadership is they got from an income tax of around 7% to about 2.7%.

That was a big achievement.

And back when they did that, they got the same question how are you going to pay for that?

Is that reckless?

And what we learned this year is that the state got $1.5 billion in extra tax revenue from actually bringing down the tax rate.

So that's a great congratulations to state leaders, including my running mate Rob McCulley, the president of the Senate who helped achieve that.

And I think we can take that economic growth to the next level.

Along with affordability and taxes, data centers are a big campaign issue.

The candidates for U.S.

Senate have been recalibrating and refining their positions on data centers.

Democratic former Senator Sherrod Brown has an ad calling Republican incumbent John Houston.

The face of data centers in Ohio, noting that as lieutenant governor, Houston recruited data centers to the state.

Brown himself praised one of those deals, a 2015 investment by Amazon Web Services.

Houston's ads have been mostly focused on Brown's record in the US Senate, but he's also said the sales and use tax break for new construction of data centers that he wants supported should end, and said the data center industry has done a bad job communicating the benefits of those facilities.

A memo from the Republican National Senate Committee this week singled out the race as a test of the issue nationwide, saying that data centers are, quote, the anchor hanging around Houston's neck, end quote and suggesting it could lead to his defeat, which could cost Republicans their majority in the Senate.

Ohio's leading business groups have endorsed the two Republican candidates for the Ohio Supreme Court, to the surprise of almost no one.

But leaders of the business organizations insist that's not just a political decision.

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce's political action committee is backing Republican incumbent Justice Dan Hawkins against Democratic First District Court of Appeals Judge Marilyn Zayas and former Immigration and Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O'Donnell.

Over.

Justice Jennifer Brunner, the only Democrat in elected statewide office.

Candidates can't talk about issues.

They might decide.

Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Steve Stivers, a Republican former congressman, said they weren't interviewed, but their judicial opinions and decisions were reviewed.

Stivers said there were several liability decisions that played a role, and said the Democratic candidates would have expanded liability and, quote, didn't interpret the law.

They actually tried to make the law from the bench, end quote.

liability contracting and expanding is not a Partizan issue.

Two justices, Republican justices in very recent memory, Paul Pifer and Andy Douglas, were a liability expanding activist judges.

They happen to have been Republicans.

We probably would not have endorsed them.

In fact, if we could have go back in time and find a conservative Democrat in either of those cases, we would have endorsed probably against them.

That's, you know, a hypothetical.

But just so you know, the party labels really mean nothing compared to the records of the candidates.

Does the Ohio Chamber of Commerce was joined in the endorsement by the National Federation of Independent Business, Ohio, the Ohio Manufacturers Association, the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, and the Ohio Business Roundtable, the coalition of the state's largest and most profitable businesses, which is led by Republican former Congressman Pat Tiberi.

Really frustrating that you can't get a judge to give an opinion or a judicial candidate to give an opinion, but that's the way it's supposed to be.

That is the way it is supposed to be.

So we really can't interview judges.

We have to look at their at their their body of work, so to speak, if they have one.

But that that's the answer.

Now, I don't expect this to be a headline in any paper or any any in use.

But this really, really isn't about partizanship.

This is the role of a judge and the business community and business owners who see this impact in real world life.

Understand that better than most.

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce PAC has never endorsed a Democrat for Ohio Supreme Court since it changed its rules to allow endorsements in 1998, and has also never endorsed the Democrats and started endorsing for governor in 2010.

A spokesperson for Justice Jennifer Brunner said in a statement, quote, As Ohio's first female secretary of state, Justice Brunner had a strong record of supporting business.

That is why have elected her, and that is why her record and experience matter more to voters during early voting and on Election day.

End Judge Marilyn Zayas wrote in a statement, quote, having decided more than 2000 appellate cases across Ohio, I have built a strong reputation as a judge who calls the balls and strikes and applies the law fairly and impartially.

She goes on.

I will continue to put the Constitution and the law before politics and special interests, end quote.

Flock cameras have been on public streets for years but have suddenly become a flashpoint.

Communities are seeing protests and residents are demanding restrictions, and there are a couple of bills in the works of the federal and state levels to regulate flock cameras and other automatic license plate readers.

But privacy advocates say it's about time.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been working against what it calls creepy cameras, and has launched a Get the Flock Out campaign to shut them down.

Gary Daniels is the legislative director for the ACLU of Ohio.

I think this is the type of thing that privacy advocates, we've all been asking ourselves the same question.

We've been talking about these issues of government surveillance and how quickly and rapidly the technology has developed and what the ramifications are.

Quite literally, for 20 years we've been talking about this.

And so now it is obviously entered the public consciousness.

I'm not exactly sure why, but it just seems like we've reached a peak here where people have finally caught on as to the capabilities of this type of technology and what that means and the lack of controls over it.

So I'm not precisely sure why it has now captured the public's imagination, but we are all very happy that it that it has.

What specifically are you worried about that can happen or can be done through these flock cameras?

Well, with this type of technology and it includes these types of cameras and similar types of technologies, but with regard to automatic license plate readers, we worry about with without any controls or anything of that nature, that this can be used for the purposes of mass surveillance of all of us, no matter where we go or what we do.

Automatic license plate readers can be set up in our set up so that, for instance, what kind of health care are you receiving?

Physical and mental.

What kind of meetings?

Political protests, rallies are you going to?

Where do you worship?

Do you go to the gun store, to the gun range, to the gun?

Show any of these types of things where people quite understandably are like, you know, I would rather the government not follow me around while I am doing this.

And that's a perfectly natural and rational reaction for people to have.

But here in Ohio, it's the Wild West.

We have no statewide laws or almost no statewide laws governing the use of this type of technology, and almost nothing at the local level.

At the ACLU Ohio, we would like to see this technology eliminated, not used by the government whatsoever, but we understand people aren't quite there.

So our goal now, if that is the situation, is to have these things regulated in such a way as to make mass surveillance as impossible as possible.

And you do have some Republican state lawmakers on your side proposing legislation to regulate them.

Senator Alcatraz, no planning a bill that would ban local and state governments and law enforcement from sharing data with a third party, and the data can only be saved in the system for up to ten days before being automatically deleted.

And third parties can't solicit that data as well.

Is that enough for you?

Yeah, we haven't seen any of the specific wording on these proposals yet.

The concern is, I think number one these days, what you really need with any kind of operation of automatic license plate readers is a warrant requirement.

The United States Supreme Court, now, over the last 15 years or so, have had three cases with surveillance technology come before them GPS devices, cell phone location information and geo tracking, which is essentially a different form of cell phone location tracking each and every time.

In those cases, three, four, three, the Supreme Court has said, get a warrant if you want to be able to do this.

These are searches for the purpose of the Fourth Amendment, get a warrant.

And then they also, while they weren't addressing specifically automatic license plate readers, they do make broad pronouncements in those rulings about people's expectation of privacy and how far this technology has come and why this is different than those Fourth Amendment cases of the past.

So I think anybody proposing any type of regulations or restrictions now, it must start with a warrant requirement.

We can talk about all these other types of things and should, but there should be a warrant requirement first and foremost.

City of Columbus held a hearing on block cameras, and you were among those who testified with your concerns.

And you said there is simply no amount of regulation or restrictions that will get us comfortable with their use and use, with their existence and use as a mass surveillance tool, whether in Columbus or anywhere else in Ohio.

So it sounds like you'd like them to not exist.

That's absolutely right.

We're just, you know, surveillance technology, it always gets better, it always gets more widespread, and it always gets cheaper.

It always rolls out.

I can remember about 20 years ago, my very first media call on automatic license plate readers.

They said they were being used only at a few highway exits, and only for the purposes of stolen cars.

What do you think about that?

And we said, well, it's not going to end there.

It's going to go much farther.

And so over the course of 20 years, particularly these last several years, we've seen them used widespread for all kinds of purposes and purposes we don't even know about.

Across Ohio and across the country.

So, you know, given our own experiences and what we've witnessed with with government and law enforcement and surveillance and everything else, we just can't be comfortable with this type of technology.

But again, some people are not there.

They're not there yet.

And so hopefully we can have some good restrictions on who the data gets shared with, how long it gets kept for, which is key to preventing abuse.

New Hampshire passed a law that says you can hold on to this data for three minutes.

A lot of other people there arguing over a month versus two months, those types of things.

New Hampshire passed something.

Three minutes.

You get to decide what to do with it.

If it's part of an investigation, you can hold on to it.

If it meets this certain criteria, get rid of all the rest.

And so we would like to see something very similar here in Ohio.

And like you mentioned, you've been talking about this for a while, and there's been all sorts of technology that has been used to solve crimes, to try to figure out what's going on in certain areas.

I mean, facial recognition technology, for instance, and all this stuff has been happening, but the sky hasn't fallen down.

The argument could be that, you know, are you overly concerned about this and are you thinking about something that will never happen?

Well, it's one thing to keep in mind is that automatic license plate readers are only one spoke of the wheel.

So we're talking about automatic license plate readers.

We're talking about drones.

We're talking about facial recognition.

We're talking about cell phone location tracking information, all of these things that can be used and are used by law enforcement and a variety of ways.

And when people we know this, when people are being watched or they fear they're being watched, they change their behavior.

So there are places they will not go.

There are activities they will not engage in.

There are people they will not hang out with because they have the government watching them.

And some people say, well, if you don't have anything to hide, then what's the what's the big deal?

Look, we should never be in a position as a society where the people are the ones arguing to the government why they want their rights maintained.

That burden is on the government if they want to violate our rights, if they want to violate our privacy, if they want to surveil us.

20 473 65 the burden is on them to explain why they need to do that, not on us, as to why they shouldn't be or must not be doing that.

And those people who are supporting the use of flock cameras say that they again, they help solve crimes, they track missing persons and stolen cars.

And are you thinking that there's another way to do that without using these automatic license plate readers?

And it should be said, flock is just one of several that are out there.

That's right.

This is not just a flock problem.

There are other corporations out there doing the same thing.

Flock.

They're the big guys on the block right now.

So they are quite understandably the target here.

But it should be no surprise to people.

And I don't want to be sound too flippant about this, but it should be no surprise to people that if we surveil you around the clock, you know what?

We're going to solve more crimes.

It's sort of like an argument to say, well, if we went around and confiscated all the firearms from every household in Columbus, Ohio, there would probably be less shooting crimes and shooting deaths and everything.

Well, of course they would.

But we say, look, we have to strike a balance here.

If you're not doing anything wrong with the firearms under the Second Amendment, you know what?

You can still have them.

So we need to strike a balance here.

And so there are some some times and some uses for automatic license plate readers where I think everybody is like, hey, we've got no problem with that.

But the number one problem here in Ohio is no laws governing their use.

We have we have a helpful law that says under Ohio's public records laws that the surveillance data, who they're following, the license plates, where they're going and everything that is not available under Ohio's public records laws.

And that is a good thing for the sake of personal privacy.

But all these other questions, who does the data get shared with?

For how long?

When can these devices be deployed versus specifically when they cannot be deployed?

All of that is left to the local governments to figure out, and they have dropped the ball as well, because there's almost nothing at the local level across Ohio as well.

I can't think of anything with these types of ramifications.

This type of policy area where our elected officials and politicians have just sort of thrown up their hands and said, hey, whatever.

But right now that is the state of affairs with surveillance technology and automatic license plate readers here in Ohio.

Did you have the same concerns about red light and speed cameras?

Yes.

Rather quaint these days.

When red light cameras rolled out, we said, yeah, it's these are tools that can be used to surveil people.

They're meant to surveil people.

They bring up obvious privacy implications, but that has been surpassed by numerous types of technologies, much more invasive over the years.

And for that matter, I don't know what it will be one year from now, two years from now, six months from now, we're going to be talking about automatic license plate readers concerns as rather quaint, because there's new technology out there that has been developed, that's being shopped around, that is much more invasive even than automatic license plate readers to follow people around to track, essentially, the digital signals that come off of the car and their phone and their credit card and everything else.

And so there's a thirst out there by private corporations to sell the rest of us, our governments, our law enforcement, the citizens that you just must, must, must keep increasing surveillance against people.

And we're going to give you the tools to do it.

And again, we're at that point now where I think Ohioans and everybody else has said enough is enough.

You can't keep doing this and keep us at least in the dark about what's going on.

But if you have a cell phone or a smartphone, you are being potentially surveilled at any point when you're walking around with that.

So what's the difference?

Yeah, that's that type of issue is what's come up in the courts in this respect.

Because, you know, when it comes to expectation of privacy, there's these discussions.

And the other side will say in court, well, you've got no interest in it because you're out there.

It's it's sort of like DNA.

It's like right now I'm leaving my DNA here.

I have no expectation of privacy.

If someone wants to come along and use it for some other purposes, law enforcement purposes.

So the court's taking a look at this and said, well, look, it's not exactly voluntary.

I mean, people use smartphones.

Almost everybody out there, not everybody, but almost everybody out there uses smartphones as part of their daily life, as part of their work life.

It is necessary for them to give up certain information about their location, about themselves, for their contract, for the service to work and everything.

And so this idea that we're voluntarily giving up this information so that anybody, including government, can access it, the court might have bought that in the past, but it's not doing it at this point.

And Ohio does have a new law on drones.

And you've been concerned about that for, I think, largely some of the same reasons here.

It requires police to get that search warrant that you were talking about to observe the interior of private spaces like homes and businesses.

And most flight data and surveillance footage are classified as public records.

There are exceptions, you would argue.

The ACLU had argued that those exceptions and what was in the law weren't enough, that you were concerned about privacy, basically.

Right.

When it comes to drone regulation, we wanted to see something much different with House Bill 251.

Again, going back to some of the arguments on the government side, they will make because you have no expectation of privacy once you step outside of your home, anybody can see you doing anything you want.

So what's the problem if law enforcement can do it as well?

So that's the argument made in courts.

House Bill 251 takes that argument and explicitly puts into state law, hey, we know we're regulating drones here.

We know we have somewhat of a warrant requirement under some circumstances, but also in the plain letter of House Bill 251, it says, but if you're outside where anybody can see you, all bets are off.

And it's exactly what we're not looking for in a drone regulation bill.

Plus, unlike our automatic license plate reader law, it says that the footage, the data that's obtained by drones is available via public records.

So you can imagine, worst case scenario, what this might mean for stalkers, what it might mean even for commercial businesses, private entities, now that have access to all of this data and what they might use it for.

So there are some good things in House Bill 251 but there's an awful lot of awful things, too.

And the most frustrating thing about it is it passed through the House and the Senate with almost no opposition, a handful of no votes, bipartisan, but but only a few on each side.

Otherwise everybody took it and ran with it.

Is the right to privacy in danger?

I mean, is there a right to privacy anymore, or are we seeing the right to privacy, slowly being chipped away with court decisions and things like this?

I think at this point we don't have privacy.

I think what the privacy advocates and other people are trying to do is trying to claw some of that back, because over the years, people would talk about and appear at forums and testifying and people would say, you know, are you afraid we might lose that right to privacy?

Or are you afraid about the future of privacy?

It's like, look, people, that ship has sailed.

That ship has sailed years ago.

So what we're trying to do now is clawed back.

These types of technologies emerged so relatively rapidly, and they improved so rapidly that it has become, understandably for very difficult, including for privacy advocates to to wrap their heads around what exactly is going on and how invasive these types of technologies are.

And once we get familiar with one type of technology, guess what?

There's like three more.

And that's been the history over the past decades of surveillance technology, public policy, and the courts struggling with exactly how to handle all of this.

And a lot of these rights are all kind of tied together.

You mentioned the Second Amendment, which I think the ACLU gets a lot of criticism for not being as vocal on Second Amendment rights as they are other things.

But you're talking about right to reproductive freedom, which in Ohio, reproductive rights is in the Constitution.

These rights are all kind of tied together.

Yeah.

The one, you know, sort of nice thing about government surveillance and this type of surveillance technology is that there's something there for everybody.

It crosses party lines.

It crosses ideological lines.

There's plenty of reason, at least on the civil liberties end, we think, for people to be at a minimum, skeptical of government.

And so it doesn't matter.

You might be concerned that they're following you to the mosque.

You might be the gun owner going to the gun show, and you don't want that camera they're viewing everybody coming in, coming out, keeping that data potentially forever and using it for who knows what.

So understandably, this is something that crosses party and ideological lines.

And that's where it becomes a real struggle for our elected officials is they can't say, oh, it's just the Democrats.

Oh, it's just the Republicans.

Oh, it's just the left.

Oh, it's just the right.

Everybody is concerned about this.

It's very similar to the conversations and the debate we're having about data centers right now is that everybody's mad.

The Second Amendment is a concern for for the ACLU.

Yeah.

It's for people who again, it's the gun show, the gun store.

You know, any of those types of things.

You're on the side of people who support the Second Amendment.

Absolutely.

So it doesn't matter what you're doing.

If you're if you're leaving people alone, if you're not breaking the law or whatever, then you should have that right to privacy.

So it doesn't matter if you're going out there for a Black Lives Matter protest or you're attending a Trump rally, those automatic license plate readers shouldn't be there surveilling you as you go there or back, or where they have them in the parking lot or what have you.

That's just not something as a quote unquote free society we should be doing or we should be tolerating.

There are estimated to be at least 6500 flock cameras in Ohio.

Several communities have put or are considering restrictions or bans on their use and on the data they share.

A recent audit in Columbus found its flock network had been searched more than 15,000 times for potentially immigration related purposes.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the state House News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

Stay in the know by registering for Ohio State House alerts through this QR code, or by texting state news to this number.

You can also hear more from us on our podcast, The Ohio State House scoop every Monday morning, and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright.com.

Porter Wright.

inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org