Breach of Trust: Surveillance in Private Spaces
House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation
2025-05-20
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Source: Congress.gov
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The ranking member is on her way over. Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time, and I recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening statement. And I am gonna go a little longer than usual, so I apologize. Liberty begins with the right to close a door. A hidden camera kicks that door off its hinges. The Constitution's Fourth Amendment enshrines a reasonable expectation of privacy. Yet today, that freedom is violated by secret cameras and hidden devices to record women and girls with impunity. Freedom is not a theory. It is the right to breathe. It is the right to dress and undress, to sleep without someone's camera filming your naked body. The founders wrote liberty in parchment, but hidden cameras erase it in pixels. I speak not just as a lawmaker, but as a survivor. Starting on November 5th, 2023, I discovered my former fiance, Patrick Bryant, had filmed women without their knowledge, without their permission, and without their consent. He filmed rape, too. He appeared to catalog his tapes and footage and images and photos in the way that he saved the files, and he stored these images, photos, and videos for years. This isn't just creepy, it's criminal, but only under weak state laws. In South Carolina, first-time voyeurs face a misdemeanor and a small $500 fine. That's not justice, that is betrayal. Real men guard a woman's privacy, but predators harvest it. When predators install covert cameras or forge explicit images, they do not just invade a room, they invade a life. And that life deserves more than a misdemeanor.
Exhibit one, behind me is a screenshot from one of the videos I found of myself. The yellow circle, this naked silhouette, is my naked body. I didn't know that I had been filmed. I didn't give my consent. I didn't give my permission. And this particular video that Patrick Bryant recorded of me on his secret camera, he saved for over three years without my knowledge. I didn't pick this fight. I don't even want to be here today and discuss this. But because he's still roaming around South Carolina free, filming whatever genital parts he wants, because no one has held him accountable, he's not in jail, he's not had to pay a fine, no restitution. He's able to rape other women, film them, and when I discovered this video, I discovered that he utilized up to four potential devices, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more. I was filmed in secret. The camera sat silent, yet it screened my safety was negotiable and my dignity disposable. All right, this is This is an image of Patrick Bryant and the co-owner of that property trying to lick his face. I think it says a lot about a man's character and what he was doing behind the scenes. This next image I'm going to show, and I'm going to ask unanimous consent to enter it into the record, is the property where many women were filmed. This is the property where I found this hidden camera, another device, at least one other device was used here to film women without their knowledge, without their permission, without their consent. This was on the Isle of Palms in South Carolina. On this one particular camera that I was filmed on and other women were filmed on, I found that there were at least 10,633 videos just on this one recording device.
I'm going to request unanimous consent to enter this into the record. Now, I was given legal access to his device, by the way, on November 5th, 2023, which is where I started to find all these things. This is a screenshot that illustrates that in the hours and days after I was granted legal access to his phone, he used an app called Samsung Smart Switch Mobile to transfer files, videos, photos, images off of his device and onto another device. On the same day that I was given legal access to his phone, I found a second mobile device. It was the Tiramisu operating system.
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