August 6, 2013

Police State: USPS, DOE, IRS, FEC, GSA, DEA, FBI, NSA, DoS, DoD Spying on You

John Ransom

8/6/2013 12:01:00 AM

 

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” thus sayeth the old cartoon character Pogo about man’s capacity to screw things up.
The folks who brought you Woodstock, opposed the Vietnam War, espoused Flower-Power and told us “All We Need is Love” have effectively instituted, nurtured and supported the largest, most obtrusive police state that has ever existed in the history of the United States. Even at its most powerful, contending with an internal rebellion, Abraham Lincoln’s government didn’t have 1/100th the reach of today’s police state. 
Yes, the Hippies who once wore combat fatigues, long hair and preached peace now wear dark suits, power-ties and preach war at elite spas like Martha’s Vineyard.
You don’t believe me?
As a prank, get together with your friends and pretend like you’re domestic terrorists on the phone for a few weeks. Talk about bombing malls, search pressure cookers on the Internet, along with homemade explosives and see how long it takes for the cops trained in military-style operations to show up at you door with a battering ram.
I especially dare Obama supporters to become this type of prankster.
Or just pretend that you consider the term “patriot” to be, well… patriotic.
Join a group like Oathkeepers, made up of veterans who are “patriotic” enough to think that the military service oath they took to preserve and defend the constitution was real.
It seems that espousing the idea that we should disobey illegal orders, as Oathkeepers does--which by the way is already the law under the Uniform Code of Military Justice-- is somehow…well I can’t use the word “unpatriotic,” unless it refers to itemizing deductions; or “citizen” unless it refers to the U.N. or show pictures of the American flag at a place where the flag was attacked, so I’ll just call it… disloyal.
And it is most assuredly disloyal.
But disloyal to whom?
The modern police state started out in the exigencies of real war, as police states generally do.
In the wake of the Cold War, under president Truman, the National Security Council came up with a recommendation known as NSC 68. It was a 58-page policy paper that outlined how to fight the Soviets without actually commencing a real war. Mostly, however, it was a recognition that the Soviets were the enemy, in war and peace and everything in between. 
NSC 68 was considered a policy success because ultimately the containment strategy it outlined worked. Largely by following the strategy first suggested in 1950, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed without resort to war.
But it also made the unwitting case for permanent war, waged in secret, throughout the world, including even here at home. And it contained the seeds of what would later be known as the Military Industrial Complex.
That complex today is out of control.
It’s led to the formation of groups as diverse as Oathkeepers and Anonymous and the Tea Party and Occupy—the real Occupy, not the astro-turfed takeover by the Unions.
Yet still, establishment progressives like the Southern Poverty Law Center have the equation backward: these groups aren’t the creators and spreaders of paranoia and conspiracy, as SPLC says; they are, rather, symptoms of the over-reaching, big-state policies where privacy is optional, even regrettable.
Getting past the massive data collection that the NSA does on all of our phone calls via pattern recognition software, the tracking of our personal computer use via the corporate statists at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and all the other companies founded by nerds, a growing number of government data are being monitored, controlled and collated to track you.
The USPS today captures an image of every piece of mail that comes to your house or that you send. That’s all they will admit to. The DEA, according to an exclusive by the wire service Reuters, is using intelligence gathered by the government to falsify “probable cause” for cases that otherwise wouldn’t meet the standard to “launch criminal investigations of Americans,” in “cases [that] rarely involve national security issues.”
The IRS and the FBI have investigated non-profit groups solely for political motives; and the White House is the largest leaker of classified information, even bigger than Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. 
The Department of Education is instituting cradle-to-grave data collection under Common Core that would identify our children personally and is sharable between government agencies.

I can’t make a phone call while standing at the pharmacy counter at Walmart, this in order to protect my privacy, yet the government can figure out where I am, what I am doing, which prescriptions I have filled, who is mailing to my house, who I called, what I do on the Internet and -– I’m not making this up—can likely read the words I’m writing right now in real time.
The government has the ability to intercept and change the contents of my email en route. And a government invested with powers, likes those, doesn’t neglect those powers for long.
Last week the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources killed Giggles, the baby deer at the St. Francis no-kill animal shelter, when “nine DNR agents and four deputy sheriffs… all armed to the teeth,” crashed the shelter executing a search warrant for the illegal alien deer. 
Aerial surveillance first alerted bureaucrats to the baby deer threat and it was likely, as one reader suggested, that her menacing, “deer-in-the-headlights” look got her shot by the 13 law enforcement officers. 
When asked why they shot the deer, in a parody of the just-following-orders routine, the officers said, “It’s our policy.”
That these policies are executed by our neighbors, relatives and friends should make it more urgent, not less urgent that we vocally and politically oppose them today, right now.