By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies, and techno-warriors.
This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government, the Surveillance State, that came into being without any electoral mandate, or constitutional referendum.
Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.
Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.
Just about every branch of the government, from the U.S. Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between, has a surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is spying on our texts, E-mail and social media posts. Led by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret potential troublemakers with so-called inflammatory posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid potentially volatile situations.
There are fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies such as the police, public health officials, transportation, and make it accessible for all those in power. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.
It’s not just what we say, where we go, and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software, and data collection that scans our biometrics, our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait, runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique identifiers, and then offers them to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
In this way, we are the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly-woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass, surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look to be child’s play.
Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
This Kafkaesque nightmare has become reality in the United States.
Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, E-mail, text messages and the like.
Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.
Most recently, the Joe Biden administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to monitor citizens online without warrant.
It would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.
In this way, corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance efforts.
The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.
Ezra Marcus writes for The New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: Tattling.”
This new era of snitch surveillance is the love-child of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically-correct, technologically-wired age.
Marcus continues:
“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a by product of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era …. the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” what we are dealing with today is not just a beast that has outgrown its chains, but a beast that will not be restrained.
—The Rutherford Institute