There are better reasons for paranoia

If you want to be a reporter, a copy editing teacher once told me decades ago, you have to have your mind in the gutter.

What he meant was copy editing requires an acute sense of the perverse, in order to avoid the kind of double-entendre mistake that happened some time ago when one editor headlined one of my stories: “NDP candidate makes history by coming second.”

Similarly, if you want to be a cop, you must possess an acute sense of the criminal, in order to anticipate the movements of the criminal element.

While people are now up in arms about city police's longstanding practice of random licence plate checks (in fact it's the practice of all police forces), I have no doubt it is directly related to the good cop's need to have a mind in the gutter.

The debate stirred up in our comments section about the ethics of this practice is a healthy one (as long as you factor out the infantile name-calling bits). In the age of NSA cyber-spooks, it is useful to have an instinct to distrust any apparent intrusion by authority on privacy.

But in this case, there is really little to worry about.

“What information is readily available from that licence plate?”Insp. Scott Fraser asked me in our interview.

Indeed, unlike the insidious cases of metadata collection recently in the news, the only kind of data a cop in a cruiser will glean from a plate check is the kind of data he or she has a right to know: Who owns the car; has it been reported stolen; is it the subject of any other kind of crime alert; and is the licence up to date and valid.

Allowing this information to get into the hands of the appropriate authorities (in this case, the police and the MTO) is part of the covenant we make with our government when it grants us a right to drive on public roads.

The other day, I brought in a damaged laptop to be repaired, and felt instinctive fear at my situation. There is data on that computer I want, and before these people I don't know can retrieve it for me, they must gain access to it.

No slur on the character of the folks handling my laptop, but the fewer strangers with access to my hard drive, the better. I believe I stressed five times, to the point of their exasperation, that the drive must be wiped completely before the machine is shipped off.

Even then, there are probably reasons for me to stay awake at night.

Am I paranoid? Perhaps. But less paranoid than I ever would be about Scott Fraser's colleagues checking to make sure someone else isn't driving my car