The question, however, isn't whether this is legal but what the Obama Administration is trying to do with the definition of legality. The history of this Administration demonstrates that it's preparing for some very troubled times and its preparations are obscenely repressive. With an economy that simply cannot return 25 million unemployed people to work, the massive retrenchment of people's rights, the slashing of our social safety nets, a society ripped apart by the frantic hysteria of weekly domestic terrorism, an insane but growing extreme right-wing and a Congress that has no popular support and is no longer governing anyone, the eruption of massive protest and resistance in every corner of the society is no surprise. Nor does it take much vision to predict that things are going to get a whole lot hotter.
The politically powerful are involved in an intense debate about how to govern this society while the social contract it has used to govern in the past can't be met. The debate rages but it's clear that all sides are talking about a more restrictive society. The key to such repression is data capture. No matter how intense and widespread this repression turns out to be, they have the data they need to make all options possible including the crushing of protest movements. Do we trust them not to use the data that way?
In past contributions to these web pages, I've written that, while we are not in a police state, the government has constructed an apparatus capability of turning this country into one with a flip of its legal switch.
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