27 Feb 2013

The U.S. Supreme Court: Architects of the American Police State

By John W. Whitehead

"The unspoken power dynamics in a police/civilian encounter will generally favor the police, unless the civilian is a local sports hero, the mayor, or a giant who is impervious to bullets." - Journalist Justin Peters

From time to time throughout history, individuals have been subjected to charges (and eventual punishment) by accusers whose testimony was treated as infallible and inerrant. Once again, we find ourselves repeating history, only this time, it's the police whose testimony is too often considered beyond reproach and whose accusations have the power to render one's life over.

In the police state being erected around us, the police can probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts. Making matters worse, however, police dogs - cute, furry, tail-wagging mascots with a badge - have now been elevated to the ranks of inerrant, infallible, sanctimonious accusers with the power of the state behind them. This is largely due to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in Florida V. Harris, in which the court declared roadside stops to be Constitution-free zones where police may search our vehicles based upon a hunch and the presence of a frisky canine.

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it's the Fourth Amendment being inexorably bled to death. This latest wound, in which a unanimous Supreme Court determined that police officers may use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops, comes on the heels of recent decisions by the court that give police the green light to taser defenseless motorists, strip-search nonviolent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and break down people's front doors without evidence that they have done anything wrong.

08 Jan 2013

The Magician's Con: Renewing FISA and the NDAA Under Cover of the Fiscal Cliff Debates

By John W. Whitehead

"If the broad light of day could be let in upon men's actions, it would purify them as the sun disinfects." - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting, and disingenuous curtain of political theatre. And what political theatre it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury yet in the end signifying nothing.

Played out on the national stage and eagerly broadcast to a captive audience by media sponsors, this farcical exercise in political theatre can, at times, seem riveting, life-changing, and suspenseful, even for those who know better. Week after week, the script changes - the presidential election, the budget crisis, the fiscal cliff, the Benghazi hearings, the gun-control debate - with each new script following on the heels of the last, never any letup, never any relief from the constant melodrama.

The players come and go, the protagonists and antagonists trade places, and the audience members are forgiving to a fault, quick to forget past mistakes and move on to the next spectacle. All the while, a different kind of drama is unfolding in the dark backstage, hidden from view by the heavy curtain, elaborate stage sets, colored lights, and parading actors.

27 Dec 2012

Compromise or Gridlock in Washington: Two Unpalatable Alternatives

By Mark W. Hendrickson

As soon as the elections were over, a wave of commentaries extolling the virtues of compromise appeared in the press. The common theme is that it is time for Democrats and Republicans alike to end partisan gridlock - to make compromises that will shrink federal deficits without driving us off "the fiscal cliff."

That said, gridlock has its defenders. They fondly remember "the good old days" in the '90s when divided government (Democratic White House, GOP Congress) produced a gridlock that kept spending increases relatively modest and eliminated budget deficits.

Gridlock today, however, is not as benign as it was then. Also, the '90s constituted a special case that cannot be replicated today.

19 Dec 2012

EyeSee You and the Internet of Things: Watching You While You Shop

By John W. Whitehead

Gifts have been bought. Presents wrapped. Now all that remains is the giving and receiving. Oh, and the tracking, of course. Little did you know that all the while you were searching out that perfect gift, you were unknowingly leaving a trail for others - namely, the government and its corporate cohorts - to follow.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, the indifference of the general public to the growing surveillance state, the inability of Congress to protect Americans' privacy, and the profit-driven policies of the business sector, the corporate state could write a book about your holiday shopping habits: the Web sites you've visited when trying to decide what to buy, the storefronts you've browsed while wandering the mall, and the purchases you've made.

Even the store mannequins have gotten in on the gig. According to the Washington Post, mannequins in some high-end boutiques are now being outfitted with cameras that utilize facial-recognition technology. A small camera embedded in the eye of an otherwise normal-looking mannequin allows storekeepers to keep track of the age, sex, and race of all their customers. This information is then used to personally tailor the shopping experience to those coming in and out of their stores. As the Washington Post report notes: "A clothier introduced a children's line after the dummy showed that kids made up more than half its mid-afternoon traffic. ... Another store found that a third of visitors using one of its doors after 4 p.m. were Asian, prompting it to place Chinese-speaking staff members by that entrance."

28 Nov 2012

Can You Trust the President, Congress, or the Courts to Protect Your Privacy Rights?

By Randy Stalsberg

"The game is rigged, the network is bugged, the government talks double-speak, the courts are complicit, and there's nothing you can do about it." - David Kravets, reporting for Wired

Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. This is the reality of the Internet-dependent, plugged-in life of most Americans today.

A process that started shortly after 9/11 with programs such as National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping and Total Information Awareness has grown into a full-fledged network of warrant-less surveillance, electronic tracking, and data-mining, thanks to federal agents having been granted carte blanche access to the vast majority of electronic communications in America. Their methods generally run counter to the Constitution, but no federal agency, court, or legislature has stepped up to oppose this rapid erosion of our privacy, and there is no way of opting out of this system.

Consequently, over the course of the past 12 years, Congress, the courts, and the presidents (both George W. Bush and Barack Obama) have managed to completely erode privacy in America. Complicating matters further is the fact that technology is moving so rapidly that we often find ourselves making decisions (or subjected to decisions) whose consequences we can scarcely comprehend.

01 Nov 2012

Looking Beyond Election Day: The Issues That Threaten to Derail the Nation

By John W. Whitehead

While it may be months before the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy can be fully resolved, Americans cannot afford to lose sight of the very real and pressing issues that threaten to derail the nation.

What follows is an overview of the major issues that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, despite their respective billion-dollar war chests, have failed to mention during their extensive campaign-trail stumping and televised debates. These are issues that aren't going away anytime soon. Indeed, unless we take a proactive approach to the problems that loom large before us, especially as they relate to America's ongoing transformation into a police state, we may find that they are here to stay.

18 Sep 2012

Smile, the Government Is Watching: Next Generation Identification

By John W. Whitehead

"You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized." - George Orwell, 1984

Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state's steady incursions into our lives. It's coming at us with a lethal one-two punch.

To start with, there's the government's integration of facial-recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1-billion boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government's current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial-recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation's growing network of surveillance cameras, to not only track your every move but create a permanent "recognition" file on you within the government's massive databases.

By the time it's fully operational in 2014, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of "iris scans, photos searchable with face-recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos." One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13-million facial images, gleaned from "criminal mug shot photos" taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having "accumulated face-image databases that in their size dwarf the earth's population," it's only a matter of time before the government taps into the trove of images stored on social-media and photo-sharing Web sites such as Facebook.

11 Sep 2012

Apple: Rotten to the Core?

By Thomas L. Knapp

As a company over the past few years, Apple has come a long way in the wrong direction - exactly the opposite direction from that indicated in the seminal, game-changing Macintosh "1984" commercial. As time goes on, Apple seems to rely less and less on its ability to create a groundbreaking product, and more and more on its ability to use the power of government to prevent others from doing likewise.

The verdict in last month's patent lawsuit - in which Apple managed to have Korean electronics firm Samsung sanctioned for, among other things, violating an Apple patent on the shape of tablet computers - is just the tip of an iceberg extending well below the waterline of recent history.

01 Aug 2012

London 2012 Olympics: The Staging Ground for the Coming Police State?

By John W. Whitehead

"As London prepares to throw the world a $14-billion party, it seems fair to ask the question: What does it get out of the bargain?" asks the Christian Science Monitor in a recent story on the 2012 Summer Olympics. "Salt Lake got to show that its Mormon community was open to the world," observes journalist Mark Sappenfield. "Turin got to show that it was not the Detroit of Europe. China got to give the world a glimpse of the superpower-to-be. And Vancouver got to show the world that Canadians are not, in fact, Americans."

And what is London showing the world? Sappenfield suggests that London is showing off its new ultramodern and efficient infrastructure, but if the security for the 2012 Olympics is anything to go by, it would seem that London is really showing the world how easy it is to make the move to a police state without much opposition from the populace.

11 Jul 2012

The Corporate Takeover of America: A Government of the Elites, by the Bureaucrats, and for the Corporations

By John W. Whitehead

"By definition, these are closed-door meetings that are part of long-term relationships between the state's highest officials and for-profit corporations. There is exactly nothing like that for citizens. This is entrenched, institutionalized, specialized access to political power in exchange for very modest contributions." - Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a citizen lobbying and advocacy group

For four days, from July 12 thourgh 15, America's governors - hosted by Virginia's Bob McDonnell - will gather in Williamsburg, Virginia, for the National Governors Association's (NGA) annual summer meeting. While there, the governors and their staffs will be "treated to amusement parks, historical sites, championship golf courses, five-star dining, an al fresco concert, and a rousing fireworks finale," much of it paid for by corporations eager to spend time with the nation's most powerful government chief executives.

Among those footing the bill for the powwow, reports the Associated Press (AP), are "Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and Northrop Grumman, the ubiquitous government and defense contractor that holds the largest state contract in Virginia history for a partnership to operate the state's vast centralized information-technology system." While the annual meeting is not open to the public, it is open to members of the NGA's Corporate Fellows Program, whose roster is a who's-who list of corporate America and whose mission is ostensibly to "promote the exchange of information between the private sector and governors and stimulate discussion among the Corporate Fellows on emerging trends and factors affecting both business and government."

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