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Friday, March 19, 2004

Dissidence Is Key To Democracy

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The leader who beats the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into patriotic fervor, for patriotism is a double-edged sword.

It emboldens the blood and narrows the mind.

julius_caesar.jpg

And when the drums of war have reached fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need to seize the rights of the citizenry.

Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will
offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know?

For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

A New Totalitarian America?


By (name withheld by request)

Here's an article I wrote for my university newspaper, I want to share it
with you.

Starting in "late spring 2004", there may be no more free speech, as we have know it today, in the United States.

Thanks to a new passenger profiling system known as CAPPS II, you could now lose your right to travel by air if the government does not like you. CAPPS II will consist of an immense database comprised of comprehensive personal data of everyone attempting to travel by air.

According to a January 18th article in the Washington Post, each traveler will be given a color code specifying their "threat level," and those receiving anything other than a "green" will be interrogated and arrested, possibly without due process.

Given the way our government has criminalized dissent, labeling hundreds
of harmless activist groups as "terrorists", it is very possible that they could do the same to individual citizens who hold alternative views, blackballing them from participation in air travel, commerce and eventually, from society itself.

One thing is clear. To the Department of Homeland Security, you are no longer an American, you are a potential terrorist.

Something as simple as paying in cash, or booking a one way flight sets
off CAPPS II alarms. Airport security is undoubtedly important, but why not zero in on suspects based on real evidence of wrongdoing, rather than circumstantial cues which more often than not, may indicate nothing worthy of suspicion?

On November 18th 2003, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that it is legal for the FBI to use cars' dashboard computing systems to listen in on conversations taking place inside vehicles, but only when they do not disable the Onstar safety system's ability to assist in an emergency.

Over 4 million cars in the United States alone are equipped with an Onstar computing system, and in 15 years it is estimated that the majority of cars on the road will use similar dashboard computing. Like most post 9/11 erosions of civil liberties, this one is surreptitiously bypassing the public eye, and being sold under the guise of "safety" and "security".

As part of a "traffic survey" in September of 2000, 48,000 motorists who had traveled along a Maryland interstate received letters from the Maryland Mass Transit Administration which stated: "Your vehicle was seen traveling on southbound I-95 near I-195 on Wednesday, Sept. 27. Please provide the following information: Where were you going? Who was with you? What was the purpose of your trip?"

No matter where we go, it is becoming impossible to escape the eye in the sky, hidden and not-so-hidden surveillance cameras. Soon it will be possible for you and I to be tracked down through the jeans we wear, the razors we buy, or the cars we drive.

How? The answer is Radio Frequency Identification tags. Send it a specific radio signal, and it sends back its serial number through the air. Attach it to anything and you can locate its host with high precision. These undetectable miniature radio transmitters and receiver units are already in widespread use.

The Gillette Corporation has ordered 500 million of the tags, Wal- Mart has followed suit, American Express and Mastercard have created RFID-enabled credit card prototypes, and the US Military requires that equipment used to carry and transport goods be equipped with these RFID tags starting 11 months from now.

Today's luxury cars come outfitted with RFID "immobilizer" circuits that won't let the cars' engines start unless the right RFID-compatible car key is put into the ignition.

In the paranoid post 9/11 climate, it's not out of the question for a policing agency to use RFID frequencies to immobilize an unfairly targeted person's vehicle, pinpoint their location using the transmitters on their razors or even erase all credit on a person's MasterCard account. RFID is getting closer to becoming an industry standard at a scary rate, and considering the "developed" world's absolute dependence on hi-tech products, the inner workings of which the vast majority of people are clueless about, it is not hard to imagine RFID tags leading to an all-pervading police surveillance state, in which the average person would be even more a slave to the products they buy.

An August 16th 2003 article in the Washington Times reported that "More than a third of Fortune 500 companies scan their employees' medical files before making hiring, firing and promotion decisions." Life insurance providers are acquiring their clients' genetic information without permission, and using this knowledge to drop coverage or reject applicants who might develop an illness others in their family have had.

Even more disconcerting was learning that "internet information brokers sell an individual's complete medical file" to anyone with 400 dollars.

The dubiously named Matrix plan, is an Orwellian information-pooling project headed by a coalition of Florida, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Michigan, Iowa and North Carolina, which share a multitude of personal details on every resident of these states.

On the one hand it may make law enforcement's job easier, but at what cost? Proponents of civil liberties compare it to the terrorism "data-mining" plan which recieved public criticism and also lost Congressional funding in 2003. Where will the violations of our rights to privacy stop?

Sadly, privacy is not the only civil liberty we are slowly being forced to say goodbye to. Donald Rumsfeld's Patriot Act has allowed all intelligence agencies to share any and all data, in effect merging the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA and many other organizations into a giant all seeing eye.

The Patriot Act has erased years of civil rights progress and awarded "our" government with total authority to collect intelligence on American citizens and imprison them for long periods without due process.

Pardon me if I'm wrong, but isn't "intelligence" something a military gathers on the enemy, not on its own people? Now we are the enemy. There was once a time when legality and morality were one and the same. That time is long gone. It is now legal for intelligence agencies to tap our phones without the consent
of a judge.

The fourth amendment of the constitution has been made null, police and FBI agents can legally conduct unreasonable searches and seizures without our permission and without first consulting a judge. It is now legal for any person suspected of "terrorism" (read: dissent and the ability to inspire in others further dissent) to be imprisoned for an indefinite period and processed by a military tribunal with no regard for civil rights.

Thanks to Rumsfeld, I could be legally detained tomorrow, for writing this
article and be held prisoner forever, with my captors not obliged to state what crime I am charged with or even required to even prove my guilt.

That's exactly what happened to Rabih Haddad, an innocent Muslim cleric who was arrested in 2001 and has been held in prison for over two years by the Justice Department for a minor immigration violation. The San Francisco Chronicle called Rumsfeld's new measures "instruments of repression, used by totalitarian states."

In addition, the fact that the majority of post 9/11 so-called terrorism arrests were actually for minor infractions like document fraud, identification theft and immigration violations has raised serious doubts about the efficiency of the new measures.

After the horror of September 11th, some say we should willingly give up many of our liberties for the goal of communal safety. Who cares if some government official knows a few thousand details about your life? Who really needs privacy?

The answer is, we all need privacy very badly.

Privacy is not only a morally sound practice, but also must necessarily be
respected by law.

The Human Rights Act gives us all a right to privacy for private and family life. The Data Protection Act 1998 was introduced to ensure that all your personal data is processed in a manner that is lawful and fair and therefore should your employer monitor your communications then it should not intrude on the employees' 'privacy and autonomy'.

But is lack of privacy really a cause for concern for law abiding citizens? Many argue that the erosion of privacy is not a problem, as long as the government is not tyrannical, and has the public's interest at the forefront of its plans. This is the case with our friends in the White House, right? This same government that values its people's wellbeing sends many thousands of its youths to risk their lives to kill people they don't even know halfway around the globe, resulting in
over 530 dead and 3000 maimed, in a conflict the majority opposes and many
claim has more to do with oil profits in the pockets of the global elite than with anything else.

Despite 11 million people in dozens of nations simultaneously taking to the streets on February 15th, 2003, protesting the war on the Iraqi people, in the biggest popular gathering in history for any reason, the U.S. government and its lackeys' worldwide violated the popular will by going on with the assault on Iraq. Despite millions of law abiding world citizens declaring that imperialism was not a way of life worth bombing for, or worth drafting and killing their own working class young men for, corporate interest behind the Iraqi conflict supercedes the wishes of the people. I guess the 17 Billion dollars the Pentagon awarded to Dick Cheney's Lockheed Martin are more important than the wellbeing of human beings.

What a peculiar "democracy" we have when the selected rulers spend more
money developing new ways to kill people (400 Billion to be exact), than they do developing ways to help people live more productive lives.

Whose interests do our "elected representatives" serve?

It is clear that we of the popular citizenry are powerless to change where resources are directed. Our taxpayer dollars help fund deplorable wars we don't support, for the goal of profit which won't be ours.

Echoing the sentiments of one of our forefathers, Thomas Jefferson, I believe that to force people to finance with their taxes the propagation of ideas in which they don't believe and in fact hate is evil and tyrannical. Yet this and further
destruction of our civil liberties happen every day. This is because our world is a corporatocracy; directed and managed by military industrial behemoths.

Volumes could be written on the instances where the governments of the world have acted against the popular wellbeing throughout recent history, actions which could easily be interpreted as tyrannical. Bush's idea of democracy is not one where the majority of the people dictate what action the leaders take, but one where the people with the majority of the money dictate what action is taken, and this is why it has been so easy for our rights to personal confidentiality to have been trampled upon.

The existence of the corporate media ensures that the perspective of the
ruling establishment is first and foremost in people's minds.
In response
to the one sided views the media bombards us with, a free speech movement
has emerged. The Internet has amplified the voice of the common person.

Americans are excited about this new power and freedom, and we should be
suspicious of a politician who seeks to limit that freedom.

Meanwhile, we have a president who believes in Internet censorship. With
regards to a website criticizing his politics, Bush stated at a televised press conference that "there ought to be limits to freedom".

Thanks to the corporate media's weapons of mass distraction and disinformation, the increasing threat to freedom of expression online (the U.N. has proposed to censor the internet), the FCC takeover of the radio airwaves which are supposed to be public domain, and the hostile militarized police forces worldwide which illegally launch violent assaults on harmless protesters, free speech is limited and the venues through which common people can broadcast their uncensored opinions are few.

Without a doubt, dissidence is key to democracy.

Without freely broadcasted dissenting opinions, America stops being not America.

The British Government is suspected of being a part of a coalition that is currently pressuring the European Union to make sure that Internet Service
Providers and phone companies keep a record of all of the nation's telephone calls, faxes, and internet and email usage from the past seven years.

Whether you have a one phone connection or dozens of electronic communications devices, chances are that what you say and what you do is being scrutinized.

Enter Echelon, the shadowy global spy system that intercepts and scans through all world communications and records the personal data of individuals mentioning sensitive keywords.

It was for years kept under a veil of secrecy, but some concerned
intelligence officials in New Zealand leaked information about Echelon to writer Nicky Hager, who describes his findings in the book, `Secret Power'. In a turn of events that confirms Hager's findings, the agency known as the Defense Signals Directorate of Australia which is allegedly involved in Echelon, has recently admitted to the existence of UKUSA, the network of five national intelligence agencies that reportedly governs the system. It is supposedly an effort to pick up on enemy communications.

Unfortunately, "enemy communications" is an extremely vague term, and an
enemy could be made out of anyone vexing the rich and powerful.

Conversations between harmless peace advocates could be deemed "enemy
communications" and this coupled with the USA Patriot Act could land any
one of us in jail for simply questioning authority.

Invasion of privacy, the filtering of acceptable and unacceptable information is all part of the same plan. The reality of these worldwide surveillance systems, is that they seek to identify dissent, for the eventual purpose of squashing difference of opinion. The powers that be are monitoring messages we express and messages we take in, and are actively stepping in to suppress the dissemination of those messages that conflict with their agenda.

Thomas Jefferson once said "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

One of the things our nation sorely needs is not an increase in paranoia, but an
amplified awareness of the battle for our minds and of the existing system of political control. The federal government must be our servant, not our master.

Why do we allow our government to maintain extreme levels of secrecy regarding many of their actions when we are not even allowed to keep a basic level of simple privacy?

Surveillance leads to the suppression of dissent, and that can only lead to a police state, nothing else.

Why do we, the people of the United States, so easily accept the obvious misuse of power we see before us?

Perhaps this 2000 year-old quote from Julius Caesar can enlighten us:

"Beware of the leader who beats the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into patriotic fervor, for patriotism is a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood and narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need to seize the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.

How do I know?

For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."





Article written by Anonymous and originally published at:
http://www.markswatson.com/totalitus.html

 
 
 
Readers' Comments    
2004-03-26 21:04:35

Chris Gupta



2004-03-25 23:14:03

karen welsh-rubinstein

Chilling... The more I read on the internet (because where else would all this get published?) the more scared I become, especially when I realize that I'm not just being paranoid about what's happening in our government.

I have an interesting story. I just put a bumper sticker on my car yesterday that said, "One Nation Under Surveillance." I parked in front of my office (in New Jersey) in the same spot I've been parking in for FOUR years. I got a ticket for illegal parking.

I took the bumper sticker off today...



2004-03-25 23:14:02

karen welsh-rubinstein

Chilling... The more I read on the internet (because where else would all this get published?) the more scared I become, especially when I realize that I'm not just being paranoid about what's happening in our government.

I have an interesting story. I just put a bumper sticker on my car yesterday that said, "One Nation Under Surveillance." I parked in front of my office (in New Jersey) in the same spot I've been parking in for FOUR years. I got a ticket for illegal parking.

I took the bumper sticker off today...



2004-03-22 17:20:54

Robin Good

Please note that the Caesar quote used in this essay is apocryphal.

Please see:
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/caesar.htm
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-caesar-quote.htm

Michael Shannon
http://www.mindspring.com/



 
posted by Robin Good on Friday, March 19 2004, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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