By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.” -James Bamford
It never fails.
Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.
In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Joe Biden administration announced its plans for a pre-crime crime prevention agency.
Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.
Pre-crime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs, to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
The pre-crime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The intention, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.
Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.
It is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.
In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.
Of course, it’s an elaborate set-up: We’ll all be targets.
In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick, all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.
Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored, to be used against you some day at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged words, and suspicious activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
It works the same in any regime.
Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler, about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”
Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: You won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state, and locked up as though a dangerous criminal.
In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, ask question of government authority, or generally live in the United States.
The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed:
Use harmless trigger words such as cloud, pork and pirates. Use a cell phone. Drive a car. Attend a political rally. Express yourself on social media. Serve in the military. Disagree with a law enforcement official. Call in sick to work. Limp, or stutter. Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle, or smell bad. Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance. Stare at a police officer. Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government. Attend a public school. Speak truth to power.
Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Yet, I point out in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship, and detention.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
—The Rutherford Institute