With SOPA and its evil twin PIPA dead in the water (or so it would seem) Congress is again using its powers of necromancy to unleash yet another internet killing bill. If you thought government overreach at the behest of the corporations it serves had surpassed China and Iran in terms of surveillance, censorship and a downright contempt for freedom of speech and privacy, think again. Just don’t put those thoughts in an e-mail, blog post or comment, Facebook update or Tweet because:
If, like most Americans, you think that a bill with disturbing, far reaching consequences for anyone with an internet connection isn’t going to effect your online activities, (“The government is welcome to peruse my Pinterest album of motivational throw pillows – it’s not like they are going to find anything incriminating there”) you might want to consider a recent SCOTUS ruling allowing invasive strip searches for “felonies” ranging from a broken muffler to multiple child murder. Even if your private parts don’t perform double duty as handy conveyances for Molotov cocktails or portable meth labs, humiliation, as applied by the web masters of slut shaming sites like ‘The Dirty’ is now government policy. Think about that the next time you want to say, board an aircraft, or more criminally, ‘occupy’ a patch of Wall Street pavement. Unless you are willing, of course, to conduct your life along the lines of a lobotomized, chemically castrated member of a purity cult under house arrest. In other words, like a real American.
6 Comments.
Back in the old days, when the gummint wanted to spy on you, it cost them money. Now, it’s all right there via the Internet. People can say all they want about “Internet-killing” bills, but the government will never kill the Internet, it is the ultimate interrogation tool AND intimidation weapon. Wait until face recognition software really gets going. You won’t be able to go anywhere without being tracked, regardless of whether you’re aware of the cameras anymore. Look at Google Wallet. Eventually, in about 20 years, when the cops stop you and find $60 in your wallet, the assumption will be that you’re up to no good. “Why would someone with nothing to hide be using cash? We’re going to have you come down to the station until you give us a good reason for why you’re holding $60 in your wallet.”
The cage is already in place, we’ve already been marched in, the heavy metal door is starting to swing shut, and a few very smart (and slightly more very greedy) people, spend every day of their lives trying to hasten the speed with which that door is moving. They think they’re doing something that makes peoples’ lives better, or they think they’ll make enough money that they’ll be able to buy their way out of being shoved into the cage as well.
You were making a kind of sense until the Google wallet, but after that -Tinfoil hat much?
The Google Wallet is a form of technology in which you don’t need to have cash in order to pay for something. Your bank account is linked to a software app on your smartphone that allows you to electronically transfer funds at the point of sale.
My point — and it is hardly “tin-foil” — is that in the past, you could buy something, and it was your business. If you were going to go on a bender, you could drive to a liquor store, buy the booze with cash without giving your name, go home, drink yourself stupid, and that was it. With Google Wallet-type technologies, you are providing — sorry, strike that — you are PAYING so that you can hand over, specific information about what you buy, where you buy it, when, what you bought with it, how you got to the place you bought whatever it was you bought, etc.
The notion of privacy as something you were entitled to, not as something you had to vigorously be sure to assert over and over, is changing. So the government videotapes people in crowds with face-recognition software? Why are you so scared about the government knowing you went for a walk? So they know you bought a porno? Big deal. The deal is that once all this apparatus is in place, when it’s all set up and ready to run, and we can be followed, literally every minute of the day, and someone in a cubicle farm somewhere can track every purchase you make, someone’s going to use it for that very purpose. And once they start, they’ll need to keep improving on it. And the only way to do that is to make the surveillance more pervasive, more intimate.
Others have already pointed out that the strip search in jail thing isn’t about inmate safety, that it’s about humiliation and terrorizing citizens. The cops now have the authority to strip search. So if they strip search you one day, no matter how humiliating it is — and for some people, it literally could be so humiliating that they will not recover from it. And no one will be able to sue the police for it. It is the ultimate cop tool of terror: a weapon that leaves no external marks and which can be done on pretty much any police budget.
You know what would be the next improvement? The police will come forward and explain how they now need to videotape the stripsearches to ensure no one can accuse them of impropriety. Oh, but don’t worry. After an appropriate period, the recordings will be destroyed. Honest.
That’s what I’m talking about. it isn’t tin-foil hattery. It’s what happens over and over when you go through the history of the police state. Surveillance, intimidation, disappearance. We’ve got a million people in prisons in this country, I don’t see that the police and the government have gotten tired of the whole thing at all.
People who carry cash are already being criminalized and targeted by police, who can confiscate it. There was a case in Texas where undocumented workers (whose transactions are all in cash) were being pulled over by cops acting as unauthorized tax collectors, and searched for minor infractions with the purpose of finding someone’s entire pay packet (or money received for the sale of a car), using intimidation tactics to seize it. Often, people with children were told unless they handed over all the cash they had on hand, they would have Child Protective Services take their children away. As tax revenues dwindle owing to the wealthy refusing to pay a fair share, police are enlisted to shake down the poor to make up for the shortfall. This tactic will no doubt be used against American citizens and not just undocumented, non-citizens who are fast abandoning the “American dream” for a safer, saner existence in their countries of origin. If you think the tracking and surveillance of all monetary transactions is nothing to be concerned about, try buying a plane ticket (or even a hotel room) using cash. You will never clear customs or immigration at an airport ever again without being sidelined and interrogated.
No, I’m very sure that claiming that one day the police are going to hold you merely for carrying cash still falls squarely in the tinfoil hat section of theories. As does claiming the police are going to one day videotape searches.
The UK has a far more pervasive surveillance state than we do, has had it for far longer, and nonsense like that hasn’t happened. And before you shoot off at the mouth- No, that does not mean I think the surveillance state is a good thing- but as long as a majority of citizens buy into this mythical “war on terror” BS, it’s what we’re gonna be stuck with.
When you don’t stick to the facts, you damage not only your own argument, but liberalism everywhere. It’s called “poisoning the well”. Look it up.
The police’s motives for shaking down motorists (as already seen in border states where undocumented workers are targeted as cash cows) comes down to economics. “Tin foil” fact. Where tax revenues are down, fines make up the shortfall, forcing police to become de facto tax collectors facing increasing pressure to meet quotas. While the more egregious examples of law enforcement targeting cash carrying citizens (the poor) is mostly limited to these border states, we can already see this scenario playing out across the country as an effective way to compensate for budgetary shortfalls for public services resulting from the wealthy refusing to pay their fair share of taxes. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most of these agencies are gathering information on US citizens. Add SCOTUS’s recent decision to allow law enforcement to carry out strip searches on anyone they deem fit to probe, the impending CISPA bill that gives private firms carte blanche to pass along your information to interested government agencies without having to face any civil or criminal action for abuses that could stem from this legislation. Consider, too, that the national conversation at the highest level during an election year is centered around limiting reproductive rights and demonizing sexual minorities. Oh, and bombing Iran. If none of this gives you pause about a locked down, national security surveillance state that uses technology as a not so subtle tactic of blackmail and intimidation to not just prevent, but pre-empt dissent, then you are probably living quite blissfully in a state of denial.