The arrest of Julian Assange marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.
There has been a coordinated smear campaign against Julian by our Thought Police, one that is amplified by the very media organizations that published WikiLeaks material. The campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called for eradicating the âfeeling of trustâ that is WikiLeaksâ âcenter of gravityâ and destroying Julianâs reputation.
There is nothing like the boot of the oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.
If Nazis scream Commies support illegal aliens because Commies want votes, why don't Fascists embrace illegal immigrants?
If Commies say Nazis support gun rights because Fascists want votes, why don't Commies reject gun control?
What if voting doesn't matter because the Uniparty has been bought off by elites?
What if Americans are going to have abortion, homosexuality, immorality, debt, wars, illegal immigrants, welfare, tyranny, and regulations no matter who wins?
The USA feels like the Twilight Zone today.
Our overlords make a decree and we just have to obey it like slaves.
Americans who were taught to love freedom must be puzzled now be told to be Nazis and Commies.
The only options now seems to either be a obedient slave and pay taxes, dropout, or go Postal.
Americans are finding out that breaking the law is easy when everything is illegal, illegal aliens don't obey the law, and the government doesn't obey the law. When you are suddenly forced to buy insurance or register your guns, you might think every law has become a joke.
Do you feel safer now?
Do Americans not feel responsible for wars, debt, checkpoints, torture, NDAA indefinite detention, kill lists, NSA wiretapping, curfews, gun bans, forfeiture, the end to the right to silence, free speech bans, torture, kill lists, no fly lists, searches without warrants, private prisons, mandatory minimums, 3 strikes laws, DNA databases, CISPA, SOPA, IMBRA, FBAR, FATCA, TSA groping, secret FISA courts, and Jade Helm?
How do you feel when someone looks you in the eye and tells you that everything is just fine?
What do you think when someone tells all the problems in the US would be fixed by a trade war, bailouts, mandatory microchip implants, a higher minimum wage, free college, launching more wars, increasing the debt, banning free speech, closing churches, outlawing protests, banning guns, outlawing straws, and increasing forfeiture?
Do you think the elites have learned their lesson and will end the police state, end the wars, and decrease the debt on their own?
Do you think tyranny won't get worse?
WTF?
Libertarian
boosted
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the âsecurity/industrial complexââa marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillanceâhas come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.
Libertarian
boosted
Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
Itâs been 70 years since Orwell â dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm â depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, âHe loved Big Brother,â we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
âTo the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone â to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink â greetings!â â George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought-crimes. The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching you."
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, and Philip K Dick.
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It wonât be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the governmentâs roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
Weâre running out of options.
Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: âOnly the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.â
Hereâs what a lot of people fail to understand, however: itâs not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. Weâve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called âhatefulâ thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Say hello to the new Thought Police.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and itâs not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, âciting concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.â
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any "threatening" words are detectedâno matter how inane or sillyâthe record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And youâre guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, âBefore Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.â
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenryâmute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears allâwe have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst usâthe proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed itâthe Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
All threeâBradbury, Huxley and Orwellâhad an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwellâs Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984:
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts....
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is âsafeâ and âacceptedâ by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
âUntil they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.ââGeorge Orwell
Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devicesâespecially cell phonesâhas created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking oneâs every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks.
- Libertarian
- https://neinchan.com/pol/
Joined May 2019
