By Michael Snyder
The control freaks are out of control. Once upon a time America was “the land of the free”, but now it has become “the land of the bureaucrats”, and these bureaucrats are absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and controlling virtually everything that you do. Last month, I wrote about how the Obama administration forced a small-time magician out in Missouri to submit a 32 page disaster plan for the little rabbit that he uses in his magic shows for kids. A lot of people thought that story was quite humorous, but the examples in this article are not so funny. In recent days we have learned that the government is monitoring just about everything that we do on the Internet, and we have also learned that a couple of innocent Google searches can result in armed government agents pounding on your front door. If you do not believe this, read on…
Thanks to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, we now know about XKeyscore, an NSA program that collects “nearly everything that a user does on the Internet“…
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.According to the documents that Greenwald has been given, NSA agents can use XKeyscore to continually intercept and analyze “an individual’s internet activity”…
XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA’s “widest reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.So if you type “the wrong thing” into a search engine, the feds could literally show up on your doorstep. One married couple up in New York recently found this out the hard way…
Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing “real-time” interception of an individual’s internet activity.
Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which begs the question: How’d the government know what they were Googling?Yes, exactly how did the government know what they were putting into Google?
Sadly, I think that we all know the answer to that question.
And when the agents got to their home, they didn’t realize their mistake and leave. Instead, they peppered the couple with questions. The following is how Michele Catalano described the experience…
[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. …Is this really what America is going to be like from now on?
Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.
We type the wrong thing into Google and the secret police come knocking on our doors?
Where will all of this end?
In Saudi Arabia, one man that set up a website that the authorities did not like was recently sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes…
The editor of a Saudi Arabian social website has been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for founding an Internet forum that violates Islamic values and propagates liberal thought, Saudi media reported on Tuesday.That may sound extreme, but we are heading down a similar path. People are going to start becoming afraid to express themselves on the Internet out of fear that they will get a visit from armed goons just like the Catalanos did.
Raif Badawi, who started the ‘Free Saudi Liberals’ website to discuss the role of religion in Saudi Arabia, has been held since June 2012 on charges of cyber crime and disobeying his father – a crime in the conservative kingdom and top U.S. ally.
This is not what America is supposed to be like. We are supposed to be a nation that respects privacy, liberty and freedom. Instead, our nation is rapidly being transformed into a heavily armed police state surveillance grid that is a paradise for control freaks.
And it is not just the Internet that we all need to be worried about. An article by Lee Bellinger described some more ways that “the police state” is expanding…
Grants to local governments for “FBI Mobile,” a portable biometric data collection system first deployed by the military to create IDs for urban-war-zone residents.For even more on this, please see my previous article entitled “10 Ways That The Iron Grip Of The Big Brother Prison Grid Is Tightening On All Of Our Lives“.
Covert naked-body scanners for checking out the general public on U.S. streets, a product being developed by Rapiscan Systems.
A fleet of roving backscatter scanning vans for expansion to all forms of ground travel.
Military-developed, next-generation Taser systems capable of stunning and incapacitating large numbers of protesters.
Active Denial System (ADS) “Pain Ray” for use here at home.
Shockwave Area Denial System, which can taser citizens within 100-meter ranges.
Laser Blinding Dazzler system, which causes temporary blindness in protestors.
Mass-deployed sedatives to incapacitate crowds.
Screaming Microwave system and ear-splitting noise machines for crowd control throughout the U.S.
In this type of an environment, even a helpless baby deer becomes a national security threat…
“It was like a SWAT team. Nine DNR agents and four deputy sheriffs, and they were all armed to the teeth,” animal shelter employee Ray Schulze told WISN-TV.Can you guess what happened to the 2-week-old baby deer?
Two weeks ago, Schulze was working in the barn at the Society of St. Francis in Kenosha, Wis., when a swarm of squad cars screeched up and officers scrambled onto the property with a search warrant.
Were they hunting down an armed robber or escaped prisoner? Conducting a drug raid?
Incredibly, they were gunning for a 2-week-old baby fawn.
They killed it – just like they are killing our liberties and our freedoms.
What in the world is happening to America?
