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America's Total Surveillance Society - by Stephen Lendman
In 2003, an ACLU report warned that "Big Brother" no longer is fiction, America having advanced to where total surveillance is now possible. Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program said:
"Given the capabilities of today's technology, the only thing protecting us from a full-fledged surveillance society are the legal and political institutions we have inherited as Americans. Unfortunately, the September 11 attacks have led some to embrace the fallacy that weakening the Constitution will strengthen America."
As a result, civil liberties fast eroded. In 2007, another ACLU report warned about America being six minutes to midnight "as a surveillance society draws near...." Powerful new technologies potentially make total monitoring possible under a president, a compliant Congress and courts that believe national security takes precedence over constitutional freedoms.
As a result, "we confront the possibility of a dark future where our every move," transaction, and communication is "recorded, compiled, and stored away" for ready access for whatever authorities may want.
One of several earlier articles on institutionalized spying can be accessed through the following link:
It reviewed undiscussed police state tools used without congressional authorization, oversight, or legal standing - state-of-the-art technology, including satellite imagery, to spy on unsuspecting Americans.
In his article titled, "Creating the Domestic Surveillance State," Alfred McCoy explained that Obama embraced the same executive powers as Bush, including NSA surveillance, CIA renditions, drone assassinations, indefinite military detentions, and more - virtual lawlessness across the board. As a result, constitutional Law Professor Jack Balkin believes bipartisan affirmation of unchecked executive powers could "reverberate for generations," subverting constitutional freedoms.
As concerned, McCoy said Americans are largely unaware of the "war on terror" toll on their rights. "Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians (say) has been going on for a long, long time."
In his book titled, "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State," McCoy chronicled over a century of US imperialism from the 1899 - 1902 Philippines conquest to the present.
As a result, America developed a coercive policing, intelligence, and surveillance apparatus to ensure absolute imperial domination, using covert infiltration and violence to curb all remnants of resistance.
Repressive tactics now include a state-of-the-art coercive national security/surveillance/counterintelligence apparatus. Established in the Philippines, it was used:
-- during the 1920s Red Scare;
-- for mass WW II incarceration of Japanese Americans;
-- during post-war McCarthy witch-hunts and secret blacklisting of suspected communists; and
