Last Updated on August 6, 2026 by Matthew Hallock
Program asks towns to forgo their job to protect citizens’ data
This is a national program that was pushed to the states through the CT Department of Transportation to the local level. Regardless of what Fairfield decides over the speed cameras – and a large majority of town residents have issues with all or parts of the program – what is left often unsaid is the position the town is now placed in. A municipality’s first obligation is to the health and safety of all residents and guests within town lines. That includes cybersecurity. For while the cloud is highly secure, it’s still subject to sophisticated penetration attacks from trained professionals around the world. The mounted cameras, facial recognition scanners in supermarkets, RR self-pay parking kiosks, virtually every homeowner’s Ring doorbell – all upload Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to the cloud.
The town is pressured to abandon its prime directive of protecting its citizens by engaging in relationships with these vendors. Reality should be the opposite – it is the town’s responsibility to protect its citizens. It is the town’s duty to set and enforce a rigid policy, where everything gets routed through the town for its review before and if it is uploaded to the cloud. Or, another solution is to NOT upload to the cloud. That’s what the financial sector does. Almost every top bank keeps their info on a mainframe computer – a big piece of iron that looks like it’s from the last century. They justifiably don’t trust the cloud, even when they have a hybrid (mix of resident and cloud) solution.
We are entering an age of Robocop when the call is for Andy Griffith. Compounding this is the common knowledge that the White House has suspended civil rights. The Department of Homeland Security has set the tone to seize private records and prosecute at will, whether it’s hunting immigrants or persecuting former FBI head and Southport resident James Comey. The movements of virtually every Fairfield resident and visitor can now be fully tracked and accessed at will by countless people serving in many capacities across the country. The traffic cameras are just one source.
As citizens revolt, towns reconsider and the ACLU files a lawsuit, the future is still up in the air. What should not be – or rather up in the cloud – is our data.
Credit: Monopoly Man @1939 Parker Brothers. The Monopoly Man is a generic character universally recognized for greed. He in no way is associated with the surveillance cameras and is only in the image to make a point.
