Police State Camera Systems: "Those who would give up essential Liberty..."

 

Police State Camera Systems and ALPRs

By Jeff Kortsch

LPWI Contributor 

 

Benjamin Franklin, in a 1755 letter to the Pennsylvania Assembly, famously said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Local governments and makers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) believe you should give up some of your liberty for the possibility of a little safety. They say the devices help police solve crimes. That may be true but at what cost? Should the government be able to track your movements around the country by reading your license plate, storing identifying information about the make, model, color, and distinguishing features like political bumper stickers and keeping that information in a database where anyone with access can see it? What is done with that information and who has access to it? What government entities is that information shared with?

In the case United States v. Jones, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government’s installation of a GPS tracking device on the vehicle of Antoine Jones to track his movements for 28 days constituted an illegal search under the Fourth Amendment.

Today, ALPRs can track your vehicle without coming anywhere near it and you get to pay for it. Where did you go today? How long were you there? Did you pass a place where a crime was committed several times even though you had nothing to do with the crime?

If this sounds to you like Big Brother in George Orwell’s book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” or something the KGB did in the Soviet Union or the Stasi did in East Germany, it does to me too. Government should not be able to keep track of your whereabouts if you haven’t committed a crime, are not in the process of committing a crime or are not about to commit a crime.

The CEO of Flock Safety, Garrett Langley, said recently in an interview with Forbes that those who are keeping track of where ALPRs are installed, such as the website deflock.me, are “terroristic organizations”. Keeping track of how and where government is surveilling you does not make them a terrorist. After the revelations of Edward Snowden, the ship has sailed on calling those who are against mass government surveillance a “terrorist”.

Use tools like deflock.me, atlasofsurveillance.org from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and plateprivacy.com from the Institute for Justice to see where there are ALPRs installed and report new ones that have been recently installed. If your local government is considering installing ALPRs, get involved in the process if they are doing the consideration in public. If your local government already has ALPRs installed, find out more information with open records requests on what is in the contract, what the cost to taxpayers is, how the data access is granted and who the data is shared with. Don’t give up some of your liberty for the promise a little more safety.

Wisconsin Homeschooling Group Receives Libertarian Party Award

 

The Libertarian Party of Wisconsin

www.lpwi.org

presslpwi@gmail.com

Contact: Reese Wood, LPWI Chair

chair@lpwi.org

May 14, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wisconsin Homeschooling Group Receives Libertarian Party Award

Madison—The Wisconsin Homeschooling Parents Association (WHPA), a support and advocacy group for education freedom in the state, has received the 2026 Ed Thompson Award from the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin.

The award, named for the 2002 Libertarian Party governor candidate and former Party chair, Ed Thompson, goes annually to a private person or public organization or business that promotes individual freedom, and a larger liberty for all, within Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Homeschooling Parents Association, a non-political and non-religious all-volunteer organization, provides a resource base and mutual help network of parents who teach their children outside of the usual government-mandated public school systems.

“Wisconsin Homeschooling Parents Association is a state-wide, inclusive, non-partisan, grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the right and freedom of parents to provide an education to their children according to their own principles and beliefs,” the WHPA states on their website.

The Libertarian Party of Wisconsin (LPWI) delivers the award every the spring. The decision on this year’s winner reflects the Party’s principles supporting alternative answers and methods opposed to the ethical and moral corruption of government-as-usual.

The LPWI Platform plank on education specifically says, “Since private education is today outperforming public education at half the cost, we call for the phase out of all state and federal involvement in education. We therefore endorse “School Choice”.” For more info on this platform or the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin, please visit www.lpwi.org .

Even Amid the Flames of War, the Market Process Endures

 

Even Amid the Flames of War, the Market Process Endures

An LPWI Press Blog Exclusive

By Lucas Peters, LPWI Contributor

April 29, 2026

In the midst of the 2026 Iran war with its blockades, naval standoffs, and artificial energy chokepoints imposed by warring states the United Arab Emirates has done what sovereign actors rarely do: it has chosen the market over the cartel. By announcing its withdrawal from OPEC and OPEC+, the UAE is set to ramp up production unconstrained by quotas. From the lens of Austrian economics and libertarianism, this is no anomaly. It is the market process asserting itself against the very states that profit from destruction.

Markets are not fragile constructs easily shattered by political violence. They are living processes driven by entrepreneurial discovery, subjective value, and the ceaseless coordination of millions of individual plans. Cartels like OPEC are not “free market” institutions; they are state-enforced price-fixing schemes. They rely on coercion (quotas, threats, political favoritism) to suppress supply and inflate prices, just as any government price control does. When war compounds this through blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions, and naval enforcement the state’s hand grows heavier. Yet the market does not simply submit.

The UAE’s move is entrepreneurial calculation. Abu Dhabi has recognized that its own long-term interest lies in unleashing production capacity already built (and expandable) via pipelines like Habshan-Fujairah that bypass Hormuz chokepoints. This is not altruism or geopolitics disguised as economics. It is self-interest rightly understood: profit-seeking actors responding to price signals and consumer demand. Even under the most severe interventions war, inflation, regulation the market process redirects resources toward their highest-valued uses as perceived by individuals. Higher prices from disrupted supply (the war’s “historic energy shock”) scream for more oil. The UAE hears the signal and acts; global consumers and businesses now breathe easier.

Libertarianism adds moral and historical clarity. Wars are not “market failures”; they are the state’s signature failure. They are the ultimate rent-seeking enterprise: governments conscript resources, inflate currencies to fund destruction, and impose embargoes that crush civilian prosperity while enriching connected insiders. Libertarians have long warned against the American empire’s entanglements and the bipartisan addiction to foreign adventurism. The Iran conflict blockades, dual chokepoints, and the predictable blowback exemplifies the pattern Rothbard decried in For a New Liberty: the state creates problems (energy scarcity, volatility) then poses as the solution through more controls. Yet even here, the free market mitigates the damage the state inflicts.

This is the beauty of the “invisible hand” in wartime: it does not require central planning, patriotic appeals, or international summits. It requires only the freedom to act. Entrepreneurs and producers, guided by profit and loss, discover ways around the wreckage. No cartel bureaucrat possesses the dispersed knowledge of local geology, pipeline capacity, investment timelines, or shifting demand. Only on-the-ground actors do. By defecting, the UAE accelerates the cartel’s unraveling, a classic example of how voluntary association and exit (the ultimate market discipline) undermine coercive monopoly.

Libertarians understand the true instability is the state system itself: cartels propped by force, wars launched under false pretenses of security, and consumers left footing the bill through higher pump prices and distorted supply chains. The market’s response here is proof that peace and prosperity are not opposites of self-interest; they are its natural outgrowth when individuals are left free. Lower oil prices mean lower costs for food, transport, manufacturing, easing the very burdens states impose through their wars.

The state cannot abolish economic law; it can only distort it, at enormous human cost. The UAE’s bold step reminds us that even in 2026’s Middle Eastern conflict, the market process endures. It alleviates the suffering. And proves the libertarian truth: the freer the people, the less the state can make us pay for its follies.

A Sweet Swearing Into Office Tuesday

 

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin member Brian Defferding (pictured) will get sworn onto the Neenah City Council, Tuesday, April 21st.

April 17, 2026

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin

www.lpwi.org  

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A Sweet Swearing Into Office Tuesday

Neenah, WI—OnTuesday, April 21^st, the City of Neenah, Wisconsin, will swear in their newest city council member, Mr. Brian Defferding, age 49, a member of the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin.

Running for a non-partisan office, Defferding based his campaign on door knocking, listening to people, and sharing their concerns. “When you talk to people, meet them where they are at [in viewpoint]. And then, tailor your response in a Libertarian way,” he said. Enough voters saw the reasonableness of his message. He beat his single opponent by 24 votes.

His opponent, a long-term city council incumbent, told Defferding several years ago that if he did not like the rules of the city, he should “move out to the country.” Instead of heeding her ridicule, Defferding got elected in 2018 as a county board supervisor, where he served a few terms and became a watch-dog against unreasonable government regulations, and an advocate to protect taxpayer money from frivolous spending.

His motivation to run this spring for city council had to do with Neenah’s 6% property tax increase, and its increase of fees by 10-15%. His opponent had always consistently voted for the numerous spending increases, and new borrowing, and tax and fees increases

Defferding also sharply criticized the city government for massive use of taxpayer money to prepare Arrowhead Park for private development.

A notoriously polluted area in the city, the park had suffered decades of chemical runoff from area paper mills. According to Defferding, Neenah’s government has spent $3.5 MILLION in various tests, legal costs etc. etc. since 2010 to try and get the area certified by the Wisconsin DNR as a safe zone for sales and developments to proceed.

Defferding’s opponent, who told him to move out of the city over its refusal to allow him to build a privacy fence several years ago, consistently voted for that spending. Calling Defferding simply an “extremist Libertarian” on her social media, the people replied to her. Defferding says that “Residents want the city to stop spending money” so unreasonably. As a Libertarian, and a new city council member, he can do a lot to protect taxpayer money.

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin 

 

For Immediate Release

April 15th, 2026

www.lpwi.org  

The Case for Privacy and "Forget Your Customer"

There's a plague sweeping across state legislatures. In the name of protecting children, they are adding requirements to add age attestations and even full identity verification, similar to banks, to use computers and/or install software with severe penalties to individual developers, including hobbyists writing free and open source software. This is a patchwork of different bills with different severity. Some just require people to state their age and some require photos and uploading of Real IDs. There’s talk of doing this at all layers: hardware, operating system, application distribution/installation, and websites.

They are building a world of computing of "own nothing and be happy" where the government has full surveillance and control over all hardware and software. There are quickly eliminating all technical workarounds. In addition to being an Orwellian nightmare of tyranny, it will legally require data to be collected and stored in enormous honeypots that will be breached and sold on the dark web. Data can't and won't ever be protected.

To paraphrase a famous cybersecurity quote, there are two types of databases, those that have been breached and those of which you don't know have been breached. Even more ominously, even the most light touch of age attestation will require all computers to inform all predators and pedophiles who query the computer who the children are. Put differently, it'll make it clear who all of the children are and paint giant bullseyes on them for predators to target.

In his recent veto of age verification of social media web sites, Governor Tony Evers called upon legislators to instead require age verification at the operating system and hardware level. The only way to protect people, including children, is for firms to Forget Your Customer. In the Information Age, privacy is security. Age verification is a veil of security when in reality, it singles out the most vulnerable.

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin Reasserts “Defend the Guard” Campaign

 

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin

www.lpwi.org

March 25, 2026

For Immediate Release

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin Reasserts “Defend the Guard” Campaign

The Libertarian Party of Wisconsin this week reaffirmed a bold resolution adopted last year in annual convention. This Wisconsin-specific initiative builds on the national Defend the Guard movement by wanting full state control over the Wisconsin National Guard, protecting it from both undeclared foreign wars and unconstitutional domestic commandeering by the federal government.

The Defend the Guard framework nation-wide correctly bars governors from deploying state Guard units overseas without a formal congressional declaration of war, as required by Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution. However, escalating federal overreach, including use of Guard forces for domestic crowd control, protest suppression, cyber-enforcement, and rapid-reaction duties demands enhanced safeguards.

“Wisconsin must lead by example,” said Reese Wood. “The states created the federal government, not the other way around. The 10th Amendment remains our unbreakable shield against creeping centralization. We will not allow Wisconsin’s militia to be turned into an arm of endless foreign wars or militarized domestic control.”

The resolution adopted by the Party in convention last year states:

“[T]he deployment of National Guard units into active combat without a congressional declaration of war undermines the constitutional balance of powers and places undue burdens on state resources….”

In line with this, the LPWI’s resolution calls on the Wisconsin Legislature to immediately introduce a comprehensive bill that strengthens existing proposals with ironclad protections against using the Wisconsin National Guard for unconstitutional and unlawful, and hence unethical, purposes.

For more on the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin or its Defend the Guard resolution, please visit: www.lpwi.org . To read the full convention “Resolution Supporting Defend the Guard Legislation,” find it here at, https://www.lpwi.org/defend_the_guard_2025_convention_resolution .

Return Liberty To Wisconsin's Budget

 May 13, 2025

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Return Liberty To Wisconsin's Budget

As we find ourselves knee deep in Wisconsin's bi-annum budget battle, The Libertarian Party of Wisconsin (LPWI) reaffirms their belief that the budgets of the past several decades far, far exceed their intended scope and the excessive, vote buying programs all need to be stripped out of the budget. It is not the responsibility of a taxpayer in Superior to pay for your childcare in Racine. It is not the responsibility of a taxpayer in La Crosse to pay for your home improvements in Wausau. It is not the responsibility of a taxpayer in Thorp to pay to rehabilitate a derelict building in Manitowoc. 

The intended scope of government at the federal, state, and local level was always intended to be as small as possible. Once we discovered that politicians could buy votes through government handouts, we created a leviathan that demands more and more resources from taxpayers for the illusion of security. 

The only way that we can truly be a society of liberty and freedom is by removing the yolk of oppressive government that requires our subservience at every turn. We should not have to pay to provide for ourselves and our families. We should not have to beg permission to live on a daily basis. We absolutely should not be forced into providing for others under the threat of punishment.

 

"Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you." - Walter E. Williams

For more on the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin, please visit www.lpwi.org.

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin 

presslpwi@gmail.com 

Press Secretary—Tim Johnson