If you live in San Clemente: Smile, you’re on Candid Camera! In this case, it’s not the TV joke show that ran, on and off, from 1948 to 2014, and used hidden cameras to catch people in funny situations. It’s the U.S. government.
The Register reported on Jan. 21 the San Clemente City Council approved a plan to partner with U.S. Customs and Border Protection “to get a $1 million camera and sensor monitoring system up and running on a hilltop at the Avenida Salvador Reservoir.” The vote was three council members for, one against and one abstaining. The snooping will be operational by the end of this month. The Feds will pay for everything.
The reason is to spy out “panga” boats, which bring illegal immigrants ashore. “We’ve had 18 panga landings on our beaches in the last year or so,” said Mayor Pro Tem Steve Knoblock, explaining his yea vote, as KABC reported from the meeting. He said that’s more than half the pangas landing in Orange and Los Angeles counties.
According to Wikipedia, Pangas are between 19 and 22 feet in length and powered by outboard motors. A typical panga, such as one intercepted off Oceanside in Jan. 2025, carries around 26 people.
“It not only looks over our entire town, but the camera can see all the way up to Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo,” Councilmember Mark Enmeier, the sole nay vote, told me. He said the CBP told the Council the camera will have “special blinders” to block out spying on residences. “However, they can turn the blinders off at any moment if they think there is some smuggling operation occurring. I brought up issues of privacy numerous times at the Council meeting. My concerns were dismissed as being paranoid.”
He sent me images showing the camera’s line of sight would be clearly looking right into San Clemente homes.
The problem is the perennial one in America of protective surveillance vs. the Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” That’s especially difficult these days when everyone wields a cell phone taking pictures of everything. On the positive side, private phone videos and police bodycams showed the abuses by ICE in Minnesota that killed two American citizens.
And just as your iPhone 17 is multiples more powerful than your 2001 Motorola flip phone, thermal imaging has become much more invasive. AI now expands detection distance and provides “a fusion analytic that couples motion detection, neural network classification databases and behavior analytics,” explained Matt Strautman of FLIR Security in New Hampshire to SDM magazine, which focuses on security matters.
“If this camera is surveilling private property, it certainly raises Fourth Amendment concerns,” Marc Scribner, a senior analyst at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, told me. He pointed to the 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision Kyllo v. United States. In the case, a federal agent used a thermal imaging device to spy into the home of Danny Kyllo to detect if he was using high-intensity lamps to grow marijuana.
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Unfortunately, Enmeier said there’s no movement by private citizens to contest the camera in court. A local ballot measure to overturn the Council’s acquiescence in the spying potentially could be placed on the Nov. 3 ballot. But there’s no movement there, either.
What San Clemente needs is the Minneapolis spirit of resistance that forced ICE to retreat from its abuses in Minnesota. The CBP should be required to deal with the panga boats without sinking the Bill of Rights.
John Seiler is on the editorial board of the Southern California News Group
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