EGAD

Police State

I think there's an assumption out there that the political blogging world talks so much about surveillance and privacy because it's made up of techie cyber-libertarians at heart, and that ordinary people don't actually have much interest in those issues. Certainly the Democrats in Congress, until recently, seem to have been operating on that assumption, given how quick they've generally been to give away the farm in that area. It's also true that the general public usually rates things like privacy pretty low on their list of priorities.

However, there's a few reasons why that could be misleading. For one thing, our oh-so-courageous mainstream media isn't inclined to stick its neck out to report on stories that it thinks nobody cares about. Thus most people have no idea what's really going on. And on the other hand, Hollywood has large chunks of the population believing that government satellites already record everything they do, say, and think, so they doubtlessly figure that any revelations coming out now are nothing new.

The truth is, things really have gotten much worse under George Bush -- in his and Cheney's pursuit of unchecked power, they have (probably intentionally) put in place much of the infrastructure of a police state.

The big discussion generator of the past week was an article in Radar -- while many of the allegations cannot be substantiated (of course), people who spend a lot of time writing and thinking about this stuff find them both plausible and extremely frightening:

... a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Meanwhile, Naomi Klein has been researching the Chinese government's security technology -- much of which American companies developed and sold them. Again, there is a tie back to Bush, which tristero highlights:

Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China.

"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy."

Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."

And let's never forget that they still maintain that they have the right to kidnap, detain, and torture anyone (even you) for any reason, indefinitely. And just in case they are forced to shut down Guantanamo, we find out that they're building a shiny new (and enormous) detention facility at Bagram in Afghanistan. You can disappear a lot of people in a 40-acre complex on the other side of the world, after all.

I pray we make it to January 20, 2009 in one piece, and that President Obama has the wisdom and courage to dismantle as much as he can of what Bush has wrought. But Bush and Cheney are running out of time, and seriously -- what kind of person amasses that kind of power if they don't intend to use it?