In the pre-Revolutionary era, British courts in London secretly issued general warrants to British government agents in America. The warrants were not based on any probable cause of crime or individual articulable suspicion; they did not name the person or thing to be seized or identify the place to be searched. They authorized agents to search where they wished and seize what they found.
The use of general warrants was so offensive to our Colonial ancestors that it whipped up more serious opposition to British rule and support for the revolutionaries than the “no taxation without representation” argument did…
And FISA was easy for the government to justify. It was a pullback from Richard Nixon’s lawlessness. It required the feds to seek a warrant from federal judges. The targets were not Americans. Never mind, the argument went, that FISA has no requirement of showing any probable cause of crime or even articulable suspicion on the part of the foreign target; this will keep us safe. Besides, the government insisted, it can’t be used against Americans… FISA has morphed so as to authorize spying down a slippery slope of targets, from foreign agents to all foreigners to anyone who communicates with foreigners to anyone capable of communicating with them.
The surveillance state regime today permits America’s 60,000 military and civilian domestic spies to access in real time all the landline and mobile telephone calls and all the desktop and mobile device keystrokes and all the digital data created and used by anyone in the United States. The targets today are not just ordinary Americans; they are justices on the Supreme Court, military brass in the Pentagon, agents in the FBI, local police in cities and towns, and the man in the Oval Office…
In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit — even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself.
This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack Obama — all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties.
The machine is made up of a lot more than the mere 60,000 sworn federal level spies who run it.
But he is right. Either you are a rabbit and you want total safety at the expense of seeing everything controlled by the overseers, or you want a world of freedom, where anything can happen. But whatever you want, chances are, you want some privacy in your own home, and the idea of having a file, and people listening to, and recording your every word you say would be disquieting.
Notice Napolitano has seen something. The accusations he makes sound crazy. Everyone is surveilled? The President? Ordinary Americans under surveillance? Local town Police Officers under surveillance? It sounds ridiculous. Surveillance is about distrust, and who would distrust a local Police Officer who underwent a background check and a psychological profile?
Yet he makes the allegations, and as a former Federal Judge, he would be in a position to know something. If you are Alt-right, you almost certainly have a file, and somebody may be watching you. So don’t step outside the lines. Behave at all times as if your every moment is being recorded. Until it all comes down, you are vulnerable.
I’m a freedom loving supporter of the Constitution, who think the system works best when it regulates itself absent external control. But I am also a chaos lover, so I see the surveillance state as a mixed bag. For now, it makes for a boring world. But when the collapse happens, and everything comes apart, the existence of the surveillance state will only add to the determination of the citizenry to tear everything down, and establish a free state once again – at least until a rabbitfied population, drunk on free resource availability abandons its responsibility to protect freedom, and limit the power and authority of government all over again.
Spread r/K Theory, because it is all coming down in spectacular fashion one day
