"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps and scan-and-frisk searches.
Just as we witnessed neighborhood cops being transformed into soldier cops, we're about to see them shapeshift once again, this time into robocops, complete with robotic exoskeletons, super-vision contact lenses, computer-linked visors, and mind-reading helmets.
Similarly, just as military equipment created for the battlefield has been deployed on American soil against American citizens, we're about to see military technology employed here at home in a manner sure to annihilate what's left of our privacy and Fourth Amendment rights.
For instance, with the flick of a switch (and often without your even being aware of the interference), police can now shut down your cell phone, scan your body for "suspicious" items as you walk down the street, test the air in your car for alcohol vapors as you drive down the street, identify you at a glance and run a background check on you for outstanding warrants, piggyback on your surveillance devices to listen in on your conversations and "see" what you see on your private cameras, and track your car's movements via a GPS-enabled dart.
That doesn't even begin to scrape the surface of what's coming down the pike, with law enforcement and military agencies boasting technologies so advanced as to render everything up until now mere child's play.
Once these technologies, which used to belong exclusively to the realm of futuristic sci-fi films, have been unleashed on an unsuspecting American public, it will completely change the face of American policing and, in the process, transform the landscape of what we used to call our freedoms.
It doesn't even matter that these technologies can be put to beneficial uses. As we've learned the hard way, once the government gets involved, it's only a matter of time before the harm outweighs the benefits.
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