The Washington Post has published a lengthy and comprehensive article about the U.S.’s domestic spy grid that’s worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a telling remark from the introduction, something we’ve been observing at “Government Against the People” since the blog’s inception: “Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.” We first pointed out this principle in a December 2009 post and have done so again in several posts subsequently. This migration of weapons, tools, and weapons from the battlefield to the homefront is one of the most important principles to understand as our country is incrementally locked down and tyranny is introduced to the Land of the Formerly Free.
Who are the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan? Anyone who resists the corporate-colonial occupiers. Who are the domestic terrorists here at home? Anyone who resists the wholesale, high-tech violation of privacy and liberty being committed by a rogue government, with corporate sponsorship, against the people. In short, a domestic terrorist is anyone who believes in and stands up for the Enlightenment Age ideals upon which our nation was founded.
Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.
Other democracies – Britain and Israel, to name two – are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.
This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.
Read more at the Washington Post.
