by Michael
Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, Submitted by Tyler
Durden on zerohedge.com in 10/28/2014
INTRODUCTION
BY Tyler Dunder
How does it feel to live under a government that is
getting even more paranoid with each passing day? The American people are told that the emerging Big Brother police
state is for our safety, but the truth is that it isn’t there to protect
us. It is there to protect them. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-28/15-signs-we-live-during-time-rampant-government-paranoia
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How does it feel to live under a government that is
getting even more paranoid with each passing day? Yes, we live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable,
but that is no excuse for how ultra-paranoid the federal government has
become. Today, every single one of us is viewed as a “potential threat”
by the government. As a result, the government feels the need to
intercept our emails, record our phone calls and track our expenditures.
But they aren’t just spying on individuals. The government keeps tabs on
thousands of organizations all over the planet, it spies on our enemies and our
allies, and it even spies on itself. The American people are told that the
emerging Big Brother police state is for our safety, but the truth is that it
isn’t there to protect us. It is there to protect them. Our government has become kind
of like a crazy rich uncle that is constantly spying on everyone else in the
family because he believes that they are “out to get him”. The following
are 15 signs that we live during a time of rampant government paranoia…
#1 Former CBS
News reporter Sharyl Attkisson says that the federal government was so
concerned about her reporting on Benghazi, Fast and Furious and other Obama
scandals that they hacked her computer,
monitored every keystroke and even planted classified material in an apparent
attempt to potentially frame her.
#2 The United
States has become the nation of the “permanent emergency”. In fact, there
has been at least one “state of emergency” in effect in this country since 1979.
#3 In America
today, almost everyone is considered to be a criminal. At this point, nearly one out
of every three Americans has a file in the FBI’s master criminal database.
#4 Most people
don’t realize this, but the FBI also systematically records talk
radio programs. The FBI says that it is looking for “potential
evidence”.
#5 In
Wisconsin, 24 armed police officers are an armored military vehicle were
recently sent to collect a civil judgment from a 75-year-old retiree. It
is being reported that officials feared that he might be “argumentative“.
#6 According
to guidelines that were recently made public, purchasing Amtrak train tickets
with cash is considered to be “suspicious activity” and needs
to be reported to the authorities.
#7 The IRS can
now seize your bank accounts on suspicion alone. If you
are successful fighting the IRS in court, you might get your money back years
later.
#8 Thousands
of Americans have their mail spied on by the U.S. Postal Service.
If you are on “the list”, all of your mail and packages are shown to a
supervisor before they are delivered to you.
#9 Most people
don’t realize that the U.S. border is now considered to be a “Constitution-free
zone” where officials can freely grab your computer and copy
your hard drive.
#10 The feds
have apparently become extremely concerned about what all of us are saying on
the Internet. In fact, they have even been caught manipulating
discussions on Reddit and editing Wikipedia.
#11 The U.S.
government has become so paranoid that it even spies on our European allies.
Needless to say, our allies over in Europe are quite upset about this but we
continue to do it.
#12 To the
government, each citizen is a “potential threat”, and this justifies the
militarization of our entire society. The following is an excerpt from an
excellent commentary by John Whitehead…
Just take a stroll through your city’s downtown. Spend an afternoon in
your local mall. Get in your car and drive to your parents’ house. Catch the
next flight to that business conference. While you’re doing so, pay careful
attention to how you and your fellow citizens are treated by government
officials—the ones whose salaries you are paying.
You might walk past a police officer outfitted in tactical gear,
holding an assault rifle, or drive past a police cruiser scanning license
plates. There might be a surveillance camera on the street corner tracking your
movements. At the airport, you may be put through your paces by government
agents who will want to either pat you down or run scans of your body. And each
time you make a call or send a text message, your communications will most
likely be logged and filed. When you return home, you might find that
government agents have been questioning your neighbors about you, as part of a
“census” questionnaire. After you retire to sleep, you might find yourself
awakened by a SWAT team crashing through your door (you’ll later discover they
were at the wrong address), and if you make the mistake of reaching for your
eyeglasses, you might find yourself shot by a cop who felt threatened.
Is this the behavior of a government that respects you? One that looks
upon you as having inviolate rights? One that regards you as its employer, its
master, its purpose for being?
I don’t think so. While this hyper-militarization of the government is
being sold to the public as a means of preventing terrorism and maintaining
national security, it is little more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In fact,
as I document in my book A
Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, what we are
dealing with is a police state disguised as a benevolent democracy, a run-away
government hyped up on its own power and afraid of its citizenry, whose
policies are dictated more by paranoia than need.
#13 As our
police departments have become militarized, SWAT team deployments have gone
through the roof. As I wrote about recently, there were only about 3,000 SWAT raids in
the United States back in 1980. But today, there are more than 80,000
SWAT raids per year in this country.
#14 The
federal government is so paranoid that it is actually spying on itself.
The “Insider Threat Program” encourages federal employees to closely watch one
another and to report any hint of suspicious
activity…
The federal effort, called the Insider Threat Program, was launched in October 2011, and it
certainly hasn’t diminished since Edward Snowden disclosed details of the
National Security Agency’s domestic spying. As McClatchy
reporters Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay have described, federal employees and
contractors are encouraged to keep an eye on allegedly suspicious indicators in
their co-workers’ lives, from financial troubles to divorce. A brochure produced by the Defense Security Service, titled
“INSIDER THREATS: Combating the ENEMY within your organization,” sums up the
spirit of the program: “It is better to have reported overzealously than never
to have reported at all.”
#15 Last, but
certainly not least, there is the matter of the NSA constantly spying on all of
us. The NSA is monitoring and recording billions of our phone calls and
emails, and most Americans don’t seem to care. But they should
care. I like how an article in the New York Post described what
is happening to our society…
Through a combination of fear, cowardice, political opportunism and
bureaucratic metastasis, the erstwhile land of the free has been transformed
into a nation of closely watched subjects — a country of 300 million potential
criminals, whose daily activities need constant monitoring.
Once the most secret of organizations, the NSA has become even more
famous than the CIA, the public face of Big Brother himself. At its
headquarters on Savage Road in Fort Meade, Md., its omnivorous Black Widow
supercomputer hoovers up data both foreign and domestic, while its new $2
billion data center near Bluffdale, Utah — the highly classified Intelligence
Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center — houses,
well, just about everything. As James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine two years
ago, as the center was being completed:
“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless
databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents
of private e-mails, cellphone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts
of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore
purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ ”
So what do you think?
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