The Surveillance State: An Inexorable March Toward Totalitarianism

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach.

Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.

Gizmodo released an article entitled “US Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition to Identify People in Moving Cars,” on 11/2/17 by Matt Novak. Here is an excerpt from that article:

The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing.

 

Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.

Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab” posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:

 “11/02/17 12:31pm  Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.

 

Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.

 

(I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…)  If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.

 

 

Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”

This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.

These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.

Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.

The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.

China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21^st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17. 

Here is an excerpt from that important article:

For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives.

 

The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.

The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.

That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.

In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State?  The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17.  This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:

Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark.  The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit .

 

China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.

China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars.  The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:

The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower.  The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”

There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”

As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens.

The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.

A Billion Dollars Of Federally Funded Paranoia

Submitted by James Bovard via The Mises Institute,

When it comes to mindless excess in the war on terror, it is difficult to compete with the 70+ fusion centers bankrolled by the Department of Homeland Security. They began to be set up around the nation shortly after 9/11 as federal-state-local partnerships to better track terrorist threats. But the centers have been a world-class boondoggle from the start.

Fusion centers have sent the federally funded roundup of data on Americans’ private lives into overdrive. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted in 2012, “Until 9/11, police departments had limited authority to gather information on innocent activity, such as what people say in their houses of worship or at political meetings. Police could only examine this type of First Amendment-protected activity if there was a direct link to a suspected crime. But the attacks of 9/11 led law enforcement to turn this rule on its head.”

Fusion centers do a far better job of stoking paranoia than of catching terrorists. Various fusion centers have attached the “extremist” tag to gun-rights activists, anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority” — even though many of the Founding Fathers shared the same creed. A 2012 DHS report went even further, stating that being “reverent of individual liberty” is one of the traits of potential right-wing terrorists. Such absurd standards help explain why the federal terrorist watchlist now contains more than a million names.

Federal management is so slipshod that a 2012 Senate investigation found that the federal estimates of spending on fusion centers varied by more than 400 percent — ranging from $289 million to $1.4 billion. A DHS internal report found that 4 of 72 fusion centers did not actually exist, but that did not deter DHS officials from continuing to exaggerate the number of such centers. The Washington Post highlighted a few of the dubious findings: “More than $2 million was spent on a center for Philadelphia that never opened. In Ohio, officials used the money to buy rugged laptop computers and then gave them to a local morgue. San Diego officials bought 55 flat-screen televisions to help them collect ‘open-source intelligence’ — better known as cable television news.”

A Senate investigation found that DHS intelligence officers at fusion centers produced intelligence of “uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” A Senate investigation found no evidence that the fusion centers had provided any assistance in detecting or disrupting any terrorist plots. Sen. Tom Coburn, who spearheaded the Senate investigation, observed, “Unfortunately, DHS has resisted oversight of these centers. The Department opted not to inform Congress or the public of serious problems plaguing its fusion center and broader intelligence efforts. When this Subcommittee requested documents that would help it identify these issues, the Department initially resisted turning them over, arguing that they were protected by privilege, too sensitive to share, were protected by confidentiality agreements, or did not exist at all.”

Spying on your Neighbors

The Senate report laid out a cavalcade of fusion-center snafus. The New York Times summarized one case: “An Illinois [fusion] center reported that Russian hackers had broken into the computer system of a local water district in Springfield and sent computer commands that triggered a water pump to burn out. But it turned out that a repair technician had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while he was on vacation in Russia.”

The fusion centers help create databases with SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports), which are usually garbage even by the lowly standard of government data. The Los Angeles Police Department encourages citizens to file reports on “individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go,” “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular telephones,” and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time.” The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security encourages people to report “people avoiding eye contact,” “people in places they don’t belong,” or homes or apartments that have numerous visitors “arriving and leaving at unusual hours,” as PBS’s Frontline reported. Colorado’s fusion center “produced a fear-mongering public-service announcement asking the public to report innocuous behaviors such as photography, note-taking, drawing, and collecting money for charity as ‘warning signs’ of terrorism,” the American Civil Liberties Union reported.

The Constitution Project concluded in a 2012 report that DHS fusion centers “pose serious risks to civil liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion. Several fusion centers have issued bulletins that characterize a wide variety of religious and political groups as threats to national security. In some instances, state law enforcement agencies that funnel information to fusion centers have improperly monitored and infiltrated anti-war and environmental organizations.”

Dylan Murphy reported at CounterPunch, “Between 2005-2007 the DHS and Maryland State Police spied upon and infiltrated anti-war, anti-death penalty and animal rights groups. Despite the fact that these were peaceful protesters who engaged in no criminal activity the surveillance went on for several years with many activists being designated terrorists.” The ACLU’s Nancy Murray wrote, “We now have proof of what peace groups and activists have long suspected: Boston Police officers have worked within the local fusion spying center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), to monitor the lawful political activity of local peace groups and track their movements and beliefs.”

Some of the most harebrained advice comes directly from the DHS. In a 2003 terrorist advisory, it warned local law-enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.” DHS officials also urged local lawmen to be on alert for potential suicide bombers who could be detected by such traits as a “pale face from recent shaving of beard.” They “may appear to be in a ‘trance,’” or their “eyes appear to be focused and vigilant”; either their “clothing is out of sync with the weather” or their “clothing is loose.” Perhaps to ensure that there will never be a shortage of suspects, federal experts advised local agencies of another tell-tale terrorist warning sign: someone for whom “waiting in a grocery store line becomes intolerable.”

The Pentagon has its own catch-all definitions of suspicious or terrorist-related behavior. Its Counterintelligence Field Activity program covertly gathered information on Americans who protested the Iraq War or who were involved with websites critical of U.S. military policy. The Pentagon has conducted surveillance on anti-war protests and gatherings, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Florida. Names gathered in such fishnets are added to a Pentagon database involving the “terrorism threat warning process,” according to Newsweek.

More and More Enemies

The Pentagon’s homeland surveillance efforts should have been no surprise considering the values promoted in its anti-terrorism training materials. The ACLU reported in 2009 that training materials taught soldiers and others that public protests were “low level terrorism.” The ACLU derided that lesson as “an egregious insult to constitutional values.”

Unfortunately, the 2012 Senate exposé of fusion-center follies did nothing to deter other agencies from casting an even wider — and more ludicrous — net for terrorist suspects. In 2014, the National Counterterrorism Center produced a report entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts.” As The Intercept summarized, the report “suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as ‘Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,’ … and ‘Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity)’ … to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies.” The report recommended judging families by their level of “Parent-Child Bonding” and rating localities on the basis in part of the “presence of ideologues or recruiters.” Would copies of Atlas Shrugged on a living-room bookshelf be enough to trigger a warning of a family at risk of “extremist ideologies”? Former FBI agent Mike German commented, “The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical, and social-service employees to rate the communities, individuals, and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face.”

Once the government gets into the surveillance business, bureaucratic momentum spurs the continual creation of new classes of potential enemies. A similar metamorphosis occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when the FBI decided to use illegal powers to target people who garnered official displeasure. Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list “from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”

Though the fusion centers are a dud on the anti-terrorist front, perhaps they are a big success in making Americans wary of speaking out against government abuses. In the 1960s and 1970s, FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with anti-war protesters to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” Nowadays, many Americans fear that there is a federal agent watching every email or click on the Internet — thus making dissent more dangerous than ever.

The Surveillance State Did Not Disappear With The Trump Victory: "It Is Still Lurking And Completely Intact"

Submitted by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne)) via SHTFPlan.com,

One of the things Donald Trump has really done correctly is to assess his future arena in the areas of intelligence-gathering and operational security.  Trump wants to return to a “courier” method of transmitting sensitive information and classified documents for the purpose of reducing the amount of material that can be hacked or stolen.  There is a subtlety about this for a caveat, in case the compliment has bloomed flowers in your thoughts: the NSA $50 billion facility for collection and storage of data in Utah won’t be shutting down anytime soon.

As Snowden’s exposés clearly pointed out, the government has clearly followed Petraeus’ glowing “internet of things” yellow brick road to form an integrated, interconnected surveillance state.  All CCTV (closed circuit television) systems, all merchants with cameras, all law enforcement cameras…all of the camera surveillance systems everywhere are either tied into data collection immediately or can be accessed for use at a later time.

The latest “Jason Bourne” movie clearly illustrates how the government can utilize devices such as cellular telephones (especially the ones with cameras) to track movements, record conversations, and be a “piggyback” to relay information to a nearby computer or a camera.  This isn’t the future: this is now.

There is an older piece written by Michael Snyder in June of 2013 entitled 27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send a Chill Up Your Spine.  The information in this article is directly from Edward Snowden that revealed exactly what the government has been doing regarding their total surveillance program.  The surveillance did not occur overnight, and in the manner of the “frog in the cold-water kettle” by stretching out the time for putting it all into place, the stultified public’s focus was either diverted or bypassed entirely.

Here are a few other pieces worth reading over regarding the government’s total information awareness and the (ongoing) growth of the surveillance state:

As can be seen, all of these developments require time, and the bypassing of the public awareness/consciousness.  Time is necessary to inculcate these changes; however, time also serves as a tool to insulate their actions from what would normally draw outcry if all the actions were taken at once.  A couple of pieces that illustrate this concept are as such:

These two pieces are extremely significant.  They show how the transfer of the Internet to U.N. control has been pushed for quite some time, now.  Guess what?  It has been done.  Obama did it in October when he handed off the control (through his Commerce Department) to ICANN, the multinational firm assigning names and numbers to Internet users and controlling content.

See, Obama quietly did this just before the election in November, and barely anyone took notice of it.  Now, legislation has been passed to “combat disinformation and ‘false’ news and propaganda,” in essence, targeting independent news media sites.  Back in 2012 when those last two cited articles were written, the country had already suffered for four years under Obama with no sign of a let-up.  The UN was coming for the guns (John Kerry’s signing the Small Arms Treaty), coming for the wilderness areas (the Agenda 21 and EPA assault on private property and public lands), and now the internet.

It wouldn’t have been tolerated and may have thrown things off for the election in the fall of 2012 for Obama.  Quietly in October of 2016, Obama sneaked it through the back door of transferring control to a corporation…the public consciousness is bypassed…and the UN-controlled corporation now has control of the Internet.  Now is the time to marginalize and criminalize public and journalist opinion to clamp down on independent thought and alternative news sources.

Obama had an eight-year ride akin to a sled going downhill: unchecked and unstopped, except for his term expiring.  Now (just as with the Overton Window principle), the paradigm shift takes a breather with Trump, who will continue the course, but at a slower pace.

The U.S. is still pointed in the direction of losing its national sovereignty and heading toward global governance, but the angle of descent is not so steep or the speed so high: this “deadens” the public’s awareness to lull them into thinking the bad years are behind us and the struggle is done with Trump’s win.

It hasn’t stopped, that sled of paradigm shift: it is still creeping forward.  If we are not vigilant, the machine that has come into creation this past decade will tighten its own screws and proceed on the course to global governance quietly, while no one notices.

It is not so much giving the people what they want, as making them believe they’re getting what they want.

Bush Jr. and Obama laid the groundwork, and the surveillance state as exposed by Snowden did not disappear with the Trump victory.  It is still lurking, completely intact just below the surface of visibility.  Where the ship will be taken will be largely in Trump’s hands, and there will be others that will influence him both where and how to steer the ship.  Guess (to paraphrase Pelosi) we’ll have to wait and see where we’ve gone to after the ship has docked.