No less traumatic and distracting were the preceding months' newsworthy events, which included a devastating typhoon in the Philippines, France and Germany's displeasure over NSA spying, the U.S. government's 16-day shutdown over Obamacare, public opposition to President Obama's plans to take military action against Syria, another shooting--this time at the Washington Navy Yard, Russia's granting of asylum to Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning's announcement that he is in fact Chelsea Manning, which came a day after he was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified documents, George Zimmerman's acquittal of murdering Trayvon Martin, and Edward Snowden's leaking the first of what would turn into a more-than-yearlong series of revelations about the government's illegal surveillance programs.
As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this sleight-of-hand distraction and diversion is how you control a population, either inadvertently or intentionally, advancing your agenda without much opposition from the citizenry. But what exactly has the government been doing while we've been so cooperatively fixated on whatever current sensation happens to be monopolizing the mainstream "news" shows?
If properly disclosed and consistently reported on, the sheer volume of the government's activities, which undermine the Constitution and dance close to the edge of outright illegality, would inevitably give rise to a sea change in how business is conducted in our seats of power.
Surely Americans would be outraged over the government's plan to turn our most casual statements into hate crimes using Truthy, a $1 million online database being created to track "misinformation" and hate speech on Twitter, as well as "detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution." Or that the Pentagon is spending millions to find ways to put down social unrest, starting with lawful First Amendment free speech protests.
Parents would be livid if they had any inkling about the school-to-prison pipeline, namely, how the public schools are being transformed from institutions of learning to prison-like factories, complete with armed police and surveillance cameras, aimed at churning out compliant test-takers rather than independent-minded citizens.
Taxpayers would be up in arms over the government's end-run tactics to avoid abiding by the rule of law, whether by outsourcing illegal surveillance activities to defense contractors or outsourcing inhumane torture to foreign countries.
And one would hope American citizens would be incensed about being treated like prisoners in an electronic concentration camp, their every movement monitored, tracked and recorded by a growing government surveillance network that runs the gamut from traffic cameras and police body cameras to facial recognition software and the armed surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies.
Unfortunately, while much of this information can be discovered through a focused study of alternative media reports, it does require quite a bit of digging and even more determination on the part of the citizenry to take an active role in their governance--which, of course, is the key to maintaining freedom.
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