by John W. Whitehead
“In a closed society the place everyone’s responsible, the one crime is getting caught.”—Hunter S. Thompson
The burden of proof has been reversed.
Not are we presumed harmless. Now we’re presumed responsible until we are able to show our innocence past an inexpensive doubt in a courtroom of legislation. Not often, are we even given the chance to take action.
Though the Structure requires the federal government to supply stable proof of felony exercise earlier than it will possibly deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the federal government has turned that basic assurance of due course of on its head.
Every one in every of us is now seen as a possible suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker within the eyes of the federal government.
Think about all of the methods wherein “we the individuals” are actually handled as criminals, discovered responsible of violating the police state’s abundance of legal guidelines, and preemptively stripped of primary due course of rights.
Purple flag gun confiscation legal guidelines: Gun management laws, particularly within the type of purple flag gun legal guidelines, permit the police to take away weapons from individuals “suspected” of being threats. These legal guidelines, rising in recognition as a legislative means by which to grab weapons from people seen as a hazard to themselves or others, will put a goal on the again of each American whether or not or not they personal a weapon.
Disinformation eradication campaigns. Lately, the federal government has used the phrase “home terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to explain anybody who would possibly fall someplace on a really broad spectrum of viewpoints that may very well be thought of “harmful.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render nearly each American an extremist in phrase, deed, thought or by affiliation. Within the authorities’s newest assault on those that criticize the federal government—whether or not that criticism manifests itself in phrase, deed or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those that share “false or deceptive narratives and conspiracy theories, and different types of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This newest authorities salvo in opposition to shoppers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the web to probably embody anybody who’s uncovered to concepts that run counter to the official authorities narrative. In different phrases, if you happen to dare to subscribe to any views which are opposite to the federal government’s, you might be suspected of being a home terrorist and handled accordingly. On this approach, authorities and company censors claiming to guard us from harmful, disinformation campaigns are, in actual fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “harmful” concepts which may problem the facility elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Authorities watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and different authorities businesses have more and more invested in company surveillance applied sciences that may mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms reminiscent of Fb, Twitter and Instagram in an effort to determine potential extremists and predict who would possibly have interaction in future acts of anti-government habits. The place many People go mistaken is in naively assuming that you need to be doing one thing unlawful or dangerous in an effort to be flagged and focused for some type of intervention or detention. The truth is, all you want to do lately to finish up on a authorities watch listing or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use sure set off phrases (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the web, talk utilizing a cellular phone, limp or stutter, drive a automotive, keep at a resort, attend a political rally, categorical your self on social media, seem mentally in poor health, serve within the navy, disagree with a legislation enforcement official, name in sick to work, buy supplies at a ironmongery store, take flying or boating classes, seem suspicious, seem confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or scent dangerous, be seen in public waving a toy gun or something remotely resembling a gun (reminiscent of a water nozzle or a distant management or a strolling cane), stare at a police officer, query authorities authority, or seem like pro-gun or pro-freedom.
Thought crimes. For years now, the federal government has used all the weapons in its huge arsenal—surveillance, menace assessments, fusion facilities, pre-crime packages, hate crime legal guidelines, militarized police, lockdowns, martial legislation, and so on.—to focus on potential enemies of the state based mostly on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and different traits that may be deemed suspicious or harmful. It’s not simply what you say or do that’s being monitored, however the way you assume that’s being tracked and focused. There’s an entire spectrum of behaviors starting from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate concepts to silencing reality.
Safety checkpoints and fusion facilities. By treating a complete populace as suspect, the federal government has justified wide-ranging safety checkpoints that topic vacationers to scans, searches, pat downs and different indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “tender” targets like procuring malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion facilities, which symbolize the mixed surveillance efforts of federal, state and native legislation enforcement, monitor the citizenry’s actions, file their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Surveillance, precrime packages. Facial recognition software program goals to create a society wherein each particular person who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their every day enterprise. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the nation, facial recognition expertise permits the federal government and its company companions to warrantlessly determine and monitor somebody’s actions in real-time, whether or not or not they’ve dedicated a criminal offense. Fast advances in behavioral surveillance usually are not solely making it doable for people to be monitored and tracked based mostly on their patterns of motion or habits, together with gait recognition (the way in which one walks), however have given rise to complete industries that revolve round predicting one’s habits based mostly on knowledge and surveillance patterns and are additionally shaping the behaviors of complete populations. With the rise in precrime packages, menace assessments, AI algorithms and surveillance packages reminiscent of SpotShotter, which try and calculate the place criminal activity would possibly happen by triangulating sounds and pictures, the burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers.
Mail surveillance. Nearly each department of the federal government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Division and each company in between—now has its personal surveillance sector, approved to spy on the American individuals. As an illustration, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the outside of each piece of paper mail for the previous 20 years, can be spying on People’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s legislation enforcement division, the Web Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly utilizing facial recognition expertise, mixed with faux on-line identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The company claims the net surveillance, which falls outdoors its standard job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is important to assist postal employees keep away from “probably unstable conditions.”
Risk assessments and AI algorithms. The federal government has a rising listing—shared with fusion facilities and legislation enforcement businesses—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and different traits that would flag somebody as suspicious and consequence of their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Earlier than lengthy, each family in America can be flagged as a menace and assigned a menace rating. It’s only a matter of time earlier than you end up wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based mostly on a data-driven algorithm or danger evaluation culled collectively by a pc program run by synthetic intelligence.
No-knock raids. No-knock, no-announce SWAT staff raids are what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America immediately, and it might occur to any one in every of us. Nationwide, SWAT groups routinely invade houses, break down doorways, kill household pets (they all the time shoot the canines first), injury furnishings, terrorize households, and wound or kill these unfortunate sufficient to be current throughout a raid. Not reserved solely for lethal conditions, SWAT groups are actually more and more being deployed for comparatively routine police issues reminiscent of serving a search warrant, with some SWAT groups being despatched out as a lot as 5 occasions a day. Police perform tens of hundreds of no-knock raids yearly nationwide.
Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who’ve nearly absolute discretion to determine who’s a menace, what constitutes resistance, and the way harshly they will take care of the residents they had been appointed to “serve and shield.” It doesn’t matter the place you reside—huge metropolis or small city—it’s the identical state of affairs being performed out time and again wherein authorities brokers, skilled to behave as choose, jury and executioner of their interactions with the general public, experience roughshod over the rights of the citizenry. That is how we have now gone from a nation of legal guidelines—the place the least amongst us had simply as a lot proper to be handled with dignity and respect as the following particular person (in precept, at the very least)—to a nation of legislation enforcers (income collectors with weapons) who deal with “we the individuals” like suspects and criminals.
Structure-free zones. Merely dwelling inside 100 miles inland of the border round the US is now sufficient to make you a suspect, paving the way in which for Border Patrol brokers to look individuals’s houses, intimately probe their our bodies, and rifle via their belongings, all with out a warrant. Almost 66% of People (2/3 of the U.S. inhabitants, 197.4 million individuals) now dwell inside that 100-mile-deep, Structure-free zone.
Asset forfeiture schemes. People now not have a proper to personal property. If authorities brokers can invade your property, break down your doorways, kill your canine, injury your furnishings and terrorize your loved ones, your property is now not personal and safe—it belongs to the federal government. Arduous-working People are having their financial institution accounts, houses, vehicles electronics and money seized by police underneath the belief that they’ve been related to some felony scheme. As libertarian Harry Browne noticed, “Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Invoice of Rights. There isn’t a presumption of innocence, no have to show you responsible (and even cost you with a criminal offense), no proper to a jury trial, no proper to confront your accuser, no proper to a court-appointed legal professional (even when the federal government has simply stolen all of your cash), and no proper to compensation for the property that’s been taken.”
Automobile kill switches. Bought to the general public as a security measure aimed toward conserving drunk drivers off the roads, “car kill switches” might rapidly change into a handy software within the palms of presidency brokers to place the federal government within the driver’s seat whereas rendering null and void the Structure’s necessities of privateness and its prohibitions in opposition to unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes each driver probably responsible of breaking some legislation that might require the federal government to intervene and take over operation of the car or shut it off altogether. The message: we can’t be trusted to obey the legislation or navigate the world on our finish.
Bodily integrity. The federal government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have prolonged right down to our very mobile degree. The controversy over bodily integrity covers broad territory, starting from compelled vaccinations, compelled cavity searches, compelled colonoscopies, compelled blood attracts and compelled breath-alcohol exams to compelled DNA extractions, compelled eye scans, and compelled inclusion in biometric databases: these are just some methods wherein People proceed to be reminded that we have now no actual privateness, no actual presumption of innocence, and no actual management over what occurs to our our bodies throughout an encounter with authorities officers. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what is going to change into the police state’s conquest of a brand new, comparatively uncharted, frontier: internal house, particularly, the internal workings (genetic, organic, biometric, psychological, emotional) of the human race. “Guilt by affiliation” has taken on new connotations within the technological age. But the controversy over genetic privateness—and when one’s DNA turns into a public commodity outdoors the safety of the Fourth Modification’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is de facto solely starting. Prepare, people, as a result of the federal government has launched into a diabolical marketing campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on an enormous nationwide DNA database.
Limitations on our proper to maneuver about freely. We predict we have now the liberty to go the place we wish and transfer about freely, however at each flip, we’re hemmed in by legal guidelines, fines and penalties that regulate and limit our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our actions. As an illustration, license plate readers are mass surveillance instruments that may {photograph} over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take an image of each passing license tag quantity and retailer the tag quantity and the date, time, and site of the image in a searchable database, then share the information with legislation enforcement, fusion facilities and personal firms to trace the actions of individuals of their vehicles. With tens of hundreds of those license plate readers now in operation all through the nation, police can monitor automobiles and run the plates via legislation enforcement databases for kidnapped kids, stolen vehicles, lacking individuals and wished fugitives. In fact, the expertise is just not infallible: there have been quite a few incidents wherein police have mistakenly relied on license plate knowledge to seize suspects solely to finish up detaining harmless individuals at gunpoint.
The struggle on money and the introduction of digital foreign money. Digital foreign money supplies the federal government and its company companions with a mode of commerce that may simply be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for knowledge, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when handy. This push for a digital foreign money dovetails with the federal government’s struggle on money, which it has been subtly waging for a while now. Lately, simply the mere possession of serious quantities of money might implicate you in suspicious exercise and label you a felony. The rationale (by police) is that money is the foreign money for unlawful transactions on condition that it’s tougher to trace, can be utilized to pay unlawful immigrants, and denies the federal government its share of the “take,” so eliminating paper cash will assist legislation enforcement combat crime and assist the federal government notice extra income. A cashless society—simply monitored, managed, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—performs proper into the palms of the federal government (and its company companions).
The Safety-Industrial Complicated. Each disaster—manufactured or in any other case—because the nation’s early beginnings has change into a make-work alternative for the federal government to increase its attain and its energy at taxpayer expense whereas limiting our freedoms at each flip. What this has amounted to is a struggle on the American individuals, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer {dollars}, and waged with a single-minded dedication to make use of nationwide crises, manufactured or in any other case, in an effort to remodel the American homeland right into a battlefield. In consequence, the American individuals have been handled like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all method of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due course of, and killed.
These packages push us that a lot nearer in direction of a suspect society the place everyone seems to be probably responsible of some crime or one other and should be preemptively rendered innocent.
The ramifications of empowering the federal government to sidestep basic due course of safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to place a goal on the again of anybody who occurs to be in the identical place the place a criminal offense takes place.
The groundwork has been laid for a brand new sort of authorities the place it received’t matter if you happen to’re harmless or responsible, whether or not you’re a menace to the nation, and even if you happen to’re a citizen. What is going to matter is what the federal government—or whoever occurs to be calling the pictures on the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be assume you’re a menace to the nation and must be locked up, then you definitely’ll be locked up with no entry to the protections our Structure supplies.
In impact, you’ll disappear.
As I clarify in my guide Battlefield America: The Warfare on the American Individuals and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to vanish.
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