The Slippery Slope: The Authoritarian State

When is a police checkpoint not a checkpoint? When it is simply the police forcing you to pull over so that a private company can ask you to participate in a "survey," which happens to include the giving of your blood and saliva.

http://filmingcops.com/checkpoints/

This is going on all over the country; for example:
Fort Worth TX: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/21/fort-worth-police-chief-apologizes-for-controversial-federal-highway-survey/
Reading, PA: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/18/pa-town-latest-to-force-drivers-over-and-ask-for-cheek-swabs-for-federal-study/
St. Louis, MO: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/local-officials-decry-feds-voluntary-sobriety-checkpoints/article_c44c9c0c-230c-5d63-8f83-cdaec9d0da01.html

It was initiated by a government agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Its supposed purpose is to gain statistical information about people driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. They hired a private company, the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation to implement the survey, which then employs the services of local police. The police flag down cars at random and direct them to pull over. Then they are approached by the survey people, pressured to take part in the survey, and offered money for participating.

The issues with this are numerous, and all are disturbing. In spite of the process being explained as "voluntary," the mere presence of police, in uniform and with lights flashing, provides an air of authority and intimidation. Coupled with high pressure persuasion and money incentives, many citizens will go along without argument. And that's a shame because the very idea of a government agency collecting bodily fluids of innocent citizens is deeply disturbing.

If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is to be deeply skeptical and suspicious when a government agency tells you that it is not collecting information on citizens, or that the information it has collected is guaranteed to be anonymous and secure. Yeah, right.

But even if the motives of the NHTSA are exactly as they say, and even if the information collected by the PIRE is totally anonymous, programs like this have a way of expanding beyond their original mission parameters, i.e. "mission creep." Consider the possibility of one more catastrophic domestic terrorist incident occurring, resulting in checkpoints becoming every-day occurrences, and the submission of bodily fluids for DNA samples no longer voluntary but required. Consider the possibility of your picture being taken without your knowledge, or your license plate being recorded, and that info then being linked to the DNA from your saliva sample. Now you are indisputably identified and inserted into a national database. Now you can be tracked, your cellphone tapped, e-mail and internet activity recorded, bank and charge accounts hacked, etc. And they will be justified in doing it, simply by saying that you might be a terrorist, or a drug dealer.

Now consider the ever increasing militarization and aggressiveness, coupled with recklessness and incompetence, that has become so typical of law enforcement in this country today:



The increasingly brazen violence of police in reacting to the most innocuous incidents has become prevalent, virtually normalized:



Join that with the vastly expanded technological capabilities that police departments have acquired as it trickles down from the military and national intelligence agencies, often paid for by grants from Dept. of Homeland Security. For example: the Indiana State Police recently spent $373,995 for a device that could allow authorities to capture cell phone data, and they won't tell anyone anything about it. Police officals say that such secrecy is essential to thwart terror attacks and fight crime. You got a problem with that?

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2013/12/08/indiana-state-police-tracking-cellphones-but-wont-say-how-or-why/3908333/

This is a recipe for disaster: the total loss of civil liberties and the emergence of a modern police state.

Are we there yet? In the larger view of history, we are not anywhere near the catastrophic levels of say Germany or Russia in the early to mid-20th century. But we are also in a different era, in which the public has been conditioned, step by step over the last 12 years, to accept such a trend as necessary and even desirable. This is the modern way of achieving authoritarian rule: not through brute force, but more subtly, step by tiny step.

It takes a loud indignant public outcry to force such changes to be rolled back. And it can be done. But the struggle continues because those who have acquired power most certainly will not give up that power without a fight.


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Pigeons

We live in the era of "share everything" and "I've got nothing to hide:"



I wrote about some aspects of this issue in a previous post called "The Slippery Slope - Surveillance." but if you aren't yet convinced why this is bad, here's another example of why privacy matters:

Your health insurance company may be buying your shopping history data and using it against you. From the Wall Street journal, Feb. 25, 2013:

"Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina recently began buying spending data on more than 3 million people in its employer group plans.  If someone, say, purchases plus-size clothing, the health plan could flag him for potential obesity...Marketing firms have sold this data to retailers and credit-card companies for years, and health plans have recently discovered they can use it to augment claims data..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323384604578326151014237898.html

Another quote: "...the so-called advanced analytics industry provides an opportunity to zero in on errant employees and alter their behavior...."

Have you noticed how often problems are dealt with by using so-called "behavior modification," otherwise known as operant conditioning? The common term in modern culture is "incentives:"

"Johnson & Johnson,  for example, pays employees $500 to submit their biometrics and other health information; J&J then offers eligible employees an additional $250 if they get pregnancy counseling, enroll in a disease-management program or get their colonoscopy on time.  The "tailored and targeted messages" paired with the monetary incentives are a "great way to bring people to participate in the program," says Dr.  Fikry Isaac, the company's vice president of global health services."

The people who operate the machinery of your everyday life aren't waiting around for you to figure this out. They have already decided that your privacy doesn't matter, They have already concluded that you don't have free will, and that the best thing for you is to control and adjust your behavior through well established scientific methods.

Thank you, B.F. Skinner, for providing corporate America with the pretext for treating the public like pigeons in a lab experiment.

The Slippery Slope - Surveillance

The subject matter of this post is intensely provocative, so I have packed it with as many links as possible from recent mainstream sources to help illustrate that the statements made are based on fact, and are happening now. Click on the orange highlighted parts to learn more.

Ever since 9/11/2001, we have been sliding down the slippery slope on the issue of domestic surveillance, towards an ever more pervasive, and invasive, surveillance state. The current scandal over the General Petraeus affair would never have gained the attention it has if the FBI hadn't made use of the vastly expanded powers it has been quietly acquiring over the last eleven years. Before 9-11, we would not have seen a complaint from a well-connected socialite about supposedly harassing e-mails trigger a full-scale cyber-investigation allowing the FBI to hack into private e-mail accounts, read thousands of e-mails and expose personal activity that was neither criminal nor a security risk. But now in today's post-9/11 total surveillance environment, it is problematic to even suggest that the FBI (or the NSA, or the CIA, or your local police department for that matter) ought not to be exercising such power over American citizens.

Under the all-purpose justification of "fighting terrorism," surveillance technologies have been developed and rolled out, like a steamroller, at a rapid pace. Typically, the technology is first introduced for military applications on the battlefield, i.e. not anywhere around here. For example, drones. First, we are shown how successful they are in a war zone at giving the good guys greater ability to detect the bad guys. In the case of drones, they can not only detect but also kill the bad guys, efficiently and safely (for the good guys). The mainstream news media helpfully airs lots of programming/promotion to help us get used to the new technology.



Then, with little fanfare, drones are introduced domestically, for use by government agencies. Of course the purpose of the new technology is at first entirely anti-terrorism, but soon that is expanded to drug dealers, illegal immigrants, search and rescue, and of course, catching cattle rustlers.

From there it trickles down to local law enforcement, and next thing you know, big cities are getting a supply of drones, developed and marketed by military contractors, and often acquired with financial aid from the Department of Homeland Security. Everyone can appreciate how great the drones are at enhancing surveillance of criminals while allowing the officers to remain safe. We are assured that the drones used by local police will not be weaponized, except that it quickly becomes obvious that they will be. They won't be used for spying on citizens, except that they will be.

Again, mainstream news is there, basically passing along press releases from the companies that make the drones, reassuring us that this is all cool stuff that we will love, and don't worry, your privacy concerns are being addressed.



The slippery slope has already become an avalanche. The issue of encroachment on the civil liberties of ordinary citizens is further compounded by the increasingly overt militarization of many police forces, again encouraged and supported by Dept. of Homeland Security, leading directly an increasing frequency of highly aggressive actions by police in response to non-terrorist, even non-criminal situations. Add to that the NSA's vast expansion of its domestic surveillance capacity and the government's insistence that it has the right to operate such programs in secret. This has led to a situation right out of Kafka, in which the Justice Department denies any challenge to the legality of being subjected to surveillance unless the subject can prove the government was spying on him, but that can't be proven because the government classifies that information as secret.

And we haven't even gotten into RFID tracking and fingerprinting of children, cell phone tracking, vehicle tracking, the amassing of biometric databases, and of course the security cameras which seem to be in use everywhere in spite of their dubious value; and the list goes on.

Where are we going with all this? We are now seeing official, taxpayer-funded surveillance and data mining of ordinary citizens expanding to stunning, unprecedented levels. There is not even a pretense anymore of using the terrorism threat to justify such radical departures from what our society used to be.

Who benefits? Who decides? We can only say for certain it is not you or me.

Here comes the typical comment: Why should I care? It doesn't affect me. I have nothing to hide anyway.

Answer: #1: Ask General Petraeus.

Answer #2: Think about someone besides yourself, who feels their privacy is important, and with good reason, say a victim of domestic violence, or a political activist.

Answer #3: Information is power, and power corrupts. We're only part way down this slippery slope. The U.S. is descending into a vast surveillance state in which privacy and civil liberties are disappearing. Do you really want to see us go all the way?

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Further reading:
Bob Koehler "The Buzzing Wasps"

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