Posts Tagged ‘surveillance’

The Algocracy Agenda: How AI and the Deep State Are Digitizing Tyranny

Posted: May 29, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”—Elon Musk

The Deep State is not going away. It’s just being replaced.

Replaced not by a charismatic autocrat or even a shadowy bureaucracy, but by artificial intelligence (AI)—unfeeling, unaccountable, and immortal.

As we stand on the brink of a new technological order, the machinery of power is quietly shifting into the hands of algorithms.

Under Donald Trump’s watch, that shift is being locked in for at least a generation.

Trump’s latest legislative initiative—a 10-year ban on AI regulation buried within the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—strips state and local governments of the ability to impose any guardrails on artificial intelligence until 2035.

Despite bipartisan warnings from 40 state attorneys general, the bill passed the House and awaits Senate approval. It is nothing less than a federal green light for AI to operate without oversight in every sphere of life, from law enforcement and employment to healthcare, education, and digital surveillance.

This is not innovation.

This is institutionalized automation of tyranny.

This is how, within a state of algorithmic governance, code quickly replaces constitutional law as the mechanism for control.

We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled by software.

Algorithmic governance refers to the use of machine learning and automated decision-making systems to carry out functions once reserved for human beings: policing, welfare eligibility, immigration vetting, job recruitment, credit scoring, and judicial risk assessments.

In this regime, the law is no longer interpreted. It is executed. Automatically. Mechanically. Without room for appeal, discretion, or human mercy.

These AI systems rely on historical data—data riddled with systemic bias and human error—to make predictions and trigger decisions. Predictive policing algorithms tell officers where to patrol and whom to stop. Facial recognition technology flags “suspects” based on photos scraped from social media. Risk assessment software assigns threat scores to citizens with no explanation, no oversight, and no redress.

These algorithms operate in black boxes, shielded by trade secrets and protected by national security exemptions. The public cannot inspect them. Courts cannot challenge them. Citizens cannot escape them.

The result? A population sorted, scored, and surveilled by machinery.

This is the practical result of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda: AI systems given carte blanche to surveil, categorize, and criminalize the public without transparency or recourse.

And these aren’t theoretical dangers—they’re already happening.

Examples of unchecked AI and predictive policing show that precrime is already here.

Once you are scored and flagged by a machine, the outcome can be life-altering—as it was for Michael Williams, a 65-year-old man who spent nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Williams was behind the wheel when a passing car fired at his vehicle, killing his 25-year-old passenger, who had hitched a ride.

Despite no motive, no weapon, and no eyewitnesses, police charged Williams based on an AI-powered gunshot detection program called ShotSpotter. The system picked up a loud bang near the area and triangulated it to Williams’ vehicle. The charge was ultimately dropped for lack of evidence.

This is precrime in action. A prediction, not proof. An algorithm, not an eyewitness.

Programs like ShotSpotter are notorious for misclassifying noises like fireworks and construction as gunfire. Employees have even manually altered data to fit police narratives. And yet these systems are being combined with predictive policing software to generate risk maps, target individuals, and justify surveillance—all without transparency or accountability.

It doesn’t stop there.

AI is now flagging families for potential child neglect based on predictive models that pull data from Medicaid, mental health, jail, and housing records. These models disproportionately target poor and minority families. The algorithm assigns risk scores from 1 to 20. Families and their attorneys are never told what the scores are, or that they were used.

Imagine losing your child to the foster system because a secret algorithm said you might be a risk.

This is how AI redefines guilt.

The Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation reveals a deeper plan to deregulate democracy itself.

Rather than curbing these abuses, the Trump administration is accelerating them.

An executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” signed by President Trump in early 2025, revoked prior AI safeguards, eliminated bias audits, and instructed agencies to prioritize “innovation” over ethics. The order encourages every federal agency to adopt AI quickly, especially in areas like policing and surveillance.

Under the guise of “efficiency,” constitutional protections are being erased.

Trump’s 10-year moratorium on AI regulation is the logical next step. It dismantles the last line of defense—state-level resistance—and ensures a uniform national policy of algorithmic dominance.

The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.

The federal government’s AI expansion is building a surveillance state that no human authority can restrain.

Welcome to Surveillance State 2.0, the Immortal Machine.

Over 1700 uses of AI have already been reported across federal agencies, with hundreds directly impacting safety and rights. Many agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, are deploying AI for decision-making without public input or oversight.

This is what the technocrats call an “algocracy”—rule by algorithm.

In an algocracy, unelected developers and corporate contractors hold more power over your life than elected officials.

Your health, freedom, mobility, and privacy are subject to automated scoring systems you can’t see and can’t appeal.

And unlike even the most entrenched human dictators, these systems do not die. They do not forget. They are not swayed by mercy or reason. They do not stand for re-election.

They persist.

When AI governs by prediction, due process disappears in a haze of machine logic.

The most chilling effect of this digital regime is the death of due process.

What court can you appeal to when an algorithm has labeled you a danger? What lawyer can cross-examine a predictive model? What jury can weigh the reasoning of a neural net trained on flawed data?

You are guilty because the machine says so. And the machine is never wrong.

When due process dissolves into data processing, the burden of proof flips. The presumption of innocence evaporates. Citizens are forced to prove they are not threats, not risks, not enemies.

And most of the time, they don’t even know they’ve been flagged.

This erosion of due process is not just a legal failure—it is a philosophical one, reducing individuals to data points in systems that no longer recognize their humanity.

Writer and visionary Rod Serling warned of this very outcome more than half a century ago: a world where technology, masquerading as progress under the guise of order and logic, becomes the instrument of tyranny.

That future is no longer fiction. What Serling imagined is now reality.

The time to resist is now, before freedom becomes obsolete.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man,” a story arc about the erasure of individual worth by a mechanized state, underscores the danger of rendering humans irrelevant in a system of cold automation and speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete.

As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”

Like Serling’s totalitarian state, our future will be defined by whether we conform to a dehumanizing machine order—or fight back before the immortal dictator becomes absolute.

We now face a fork in the road: resist the rise of the immortal dictator or submit to the reign of the machine.

This is not a battle against technology, but a battle against the unchecked, unregulated, and undemocratic use of technology to control people.

We must demand algorithmic transparency, data ownership rights, and legal recourse against automated decisions. We need a Digital Bill of Rights that guarantees:

  • The right to know how algorithms affect us.
  • The right to challenge and appeal automated decisions.
  • The right to privacy and data security.
  • The right to be free from automated surveillance and predictive policing.
  • The right to be forgotten.

Otherwise, AI becomes the ultimate enforcer of a surveillance state from which there is no escape.

As Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, warned: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about. Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

An immortal dictator, indeed.

Let us be clear: the threat is not just to our privacy, but to democracy itself.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the time to fight back is now—before the code becomes law, and freedom becomes a memory.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/pmj64bcb

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone

Posted: April 1, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”—James Madison

It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.

Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.

Where do you draw the line?

How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?

At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?

Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?

Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.

Take immigration, for example.

President Trump wants us to believe that the nation’s security is so threatened by illegal immigrants that we should tolerate roving bands of ICE and border patrol agents disregarding the Constitution at every turn.

But these government agents aren’t just disregarding it—they’re trampling it with the blessing of the man who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” that very same Constitution.

First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and protest. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process. Sixth Amendment protections ensuring a right to legal counsel. Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.

All of these and more are being imperiously swept aside in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of an America “for Americans and Americans only.”

Trump has invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsion of illegal immigrants, whom Trump has likened to terrorists, killers, criminals, and enemies of the state.

However, with national security being used as a pretext to strip away rights on a larger scale than just criminals, the individuals targeted by the Trump Administration’s overreach represent a broader cross-section of American society: immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who live and work in the mainland of the United States. (It is estimated that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, contributing $59.4 billion to the federal government, including payments for federal income tax and federal social insurance such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. In other words, they are paying for entitlement programs for which they do not receive benefits.)

Individuals whose visas allow them to legally reside in the U.S. are also being rounded up and made to disappear without due process.

The reports of how these round-ups are being carried out—with ambushes on city streets, in broad daylight, at the hands of masked, plainclothes officers, and without any charges being levied, court hearings or defense attorneys notified—are beyond chilling.

Some are being targeted based on their nationality. Some are being racially profiled. Some are being classified as criminal based solely on the fact that they have tattoos. Some, like Abrego Garcia, are being mistakenly snatched up and deported to private prisons in foreign countries, beyond the physical reach of U.S. courts.

As Garcia’s attorney warned, the Trump Administration seems to have adopted the mindset that “the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

And then there are the scientists, doctors, academics and students who are being rounded up because at some point they voiced their concerns about the mounting death toll in Palestine.

With the Trump Administration now equating even the perception of antisemitism as terrorism, that puts anyone in the government crosshairs who even dares to suggest that the killing of civilian women and children in Palestine is wrong.

For example, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk wrote an op-ed calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. That’s all it took for her to be placed on the government’s enemies list, stripped of her visa without warning or notice, surrounded on the street by a small army of masked agents, and whisked out of state to a detention center 1500 miles away without any family or friend knowing her whereabouts.

These arbitrary roundups and deportations are not just violations of the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. They also trample the First Amendment’s right to free speech and assembly, particularly for those who speak out against government policies.

These actions are not limited to just immigrants or perceived enemies—they extend to anyone daring to challenge the status quo. Whether it’s activists, academics, or everyday citizens, being targeted for political expression is an assault on the very essence of free speech.

In this way, these round-ups represent the beginning of the slippery slope, leading not just to arbitrary detentions and the expansion of private prisons as an extension of the police state but to an eventual authoritarian regime where dissent is suppressed, and constitutional rights are discarded.

This is not just happening at the southern border.

These round-ups are increasingly occurring in cities like New York, Boston, and northern Virginia, with many U.S. citizens also being swept up in warrantless searches, surveillance, and overreach from federal and local law enforcement.

Where once the nation’s border constituted a thin line, it is becoming an ever-thickening zone dominated by authoritarianism and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

This zone impacts millions of Americans who have never been near a border—citizens who live in everyday places, like urban and suburban areas, yet are subject to government overreach.

As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”

Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, or 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

In this authoritarian reshaping of America, no one is safe, not even in their own homes.

The government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone translates to greater numbers of Americans being subject to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.

From facial recognition software to mass data collection, surveillance technology is being used to monitor immigrants and ordinary citizens alike who are not suspected of any crime.

With Trump considering plans to turn a portion of the southern border into an expansive military installation policed by active-duty troops, we’re going to see even more of these assaults on our freedoms. As Trump promised after Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested because of his anti-war activism, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Miller explains:

“In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant.”

Across the nation, local police forces are becoming militarized extensions of federal agencies like CBP and DHS, routinely receiving federal funds and training to act as armed enforcers of national security policies. By the time you add the military into that equation, you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for martial law.

The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.

Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.

As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”

In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border agents have nearly unlimited discretion to stop, search, interrogate and arrest anyone they “suspect,” based on arbitrary factors such as:

  • Driving an unusual vehicle.
  • Passengers appearing “suspicious.”
  • Having a dusty or modified car.
  • Avoiding eye contact or looking too long at an officer.

These arbitrary and broad criteria make it easy for any citizen to be targeted without just cause, turning everyday travel into a potential confrontation with law enforcement. In other words, anything goes when it comes to the police state’s justifications for undermining our rights.

These troubling developments at the borders are just one part of a broader erosion of constitutional rights that has been underway for decades in the name of national security.

When we look back at history, we see a consistent pattern of political power grabbing in the name of national security. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the War on Terror, the price of security is always paid by our freedoms—and each step we take brings us closer to a system where those in power determine the limits of our liberty by using national security as an excuse to curtail fundamental freedoms.

Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump capitalized on this historical pattern by claiming that the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and enlist the military to “assist” with border control.

Continuing this trend, Joe Biden sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border, in anticipation of more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day—reinforcing the military presence and fortifying the unchecked power at the border.

And now Trump is doubling down on everything he and his predecessors have done to fortify this unchecked power.

This pattern of exploiting national security fears for authoritarian control has continued into the present day with Trump’s immigration crisis becoming a pretext for greater control, a strategy to stoke fear and justify authoritarianism.

Yet despite the propaganda coming from the White House, the looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.

Before long, the only Americans qualified to live freely in Trump’s America will be those who march in lockstep with the Deep State’s dictates, and even absolute compliance is no guarantee of safety.

It used to be that the Constitution was our only reliable safety net, but that is being systematically dismantled.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government is now the greatest threat to our safety, and there’s no border wall big enough to protect us from these ruffians in our midst.

The answer to this growing tyranny begins with us—“We the people.”

The Constitution should not be negotiable. Freedom is not negotiable.

You want to make America great again? Start by making America free again.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mrr944pv

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and Government?

Posted: January 30, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”—Elon Musk (2018)

The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.

While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down the nation, there is a more subversive power play taking place under cover of Trump’s unique brand of circus politics.

Take a closer look at what’s unfolding, and you will find that all appearances to the contrary, Trump isn’t planning to do away with the Deep State. Rather, he was hired by the Deep State to usher in the golden age of AI.

Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.

To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.

Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.

What we are approaching is the point of no return.

In tech speak, this point of no return is more aptly termed “singularity,” the point at which AI eclipses its human handlers and becomes all-powerful. Elon Musk has predicted that singularity could happen by 2026. AI scientist Ray Kurzweil imagines it happening it closer to 2045.

While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”

According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.

Here’s a thought: what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force isn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

Certainly, Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump signed the first-ever Executive Order on AI in 2019. More recently, Trump issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.

President Biden was no better, mind you. His executive order, which Trump repealed, merely instructed the tech sector to share the results of AI safety tests with the U.S. government.

Yet following much the same pattern that we saw with the rollout of drones, while the government has been quick to avail itself of AI technology, it has done little to nothing to ensure that rights of the American people are protected.

Indeed, we are altogether lacking any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of AI.

As Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan point out in a chilling article in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology about the risks to privacy and democracy posed by AI, “[a]rtificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of the modern era… Its impact is likely to dwarf even the development of the internet as it enters every corner of our lives… Advances in AI herald not just a new age in computing, but also present new dangers to social values and constitutional rights. The threat to privacy from social media algorithms and the Internet of Things is well known. What is less appreciated is the even greater threat that AI poses to democracy itself.”

Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”

In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?

The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.

In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before. That does not even begin to touch on agencies that did not report their usage, or usage at the state and local levels.

Of those 1700 cases at the federal level, 227 were labeled rights- or safety-impacting.

A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

This is what is referred to within tech circles as “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. In one particular case, police used AI-powered facial recognition technology to arrest and jail a 29-year-old man for brutally assaulting a security guard. It would take Christopher Gatlin two years to clear his name.

Gatlin is one of at least eight known cases nationwide in which police reliance on AI facial recognition software has resulted in resulted in wrongful arrests arising from an utter disregard for basic police work (such as checking alibis, collecting evidence, corroborating DNA and fingerprint evidence, ignoring suspects’ physical characteristics) and the need to meet constitutional standards of due process and probable cause. According to The Washington Post, “Asian and Black people were up to 100 times as likely to be misidentified by some software as White men.”

The numbers of cases in which AI is contributed to false arrests and questionable police work is likely much higher, given the extent to which police agencies across the country are adopting the technology and will only rise in the wake of the Trump Administration’s intent to shut down law enforcement oversight and policing reforms.

“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.

It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.

When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.

So where do we go from here?

For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

Writing for the Yale Journal, Manheim and Kaplan conclude that “[h]umans may not be at risk as a species, but we are surely at risk in terms of our democratic institutions and values.”

Privacy­—Manheim and Kaplan succinctly describe it as “the right to make personal decisions for oneself, the right to keep one’s personal information confidential, and the right to be left alone are all ingredients of the fundamental right of privacy”— is especially at risk.

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

As Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO remarked, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.

Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.

This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.

Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.

The future of freedom depends on it.

So demand transparency. Demand accountability.

Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.

We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it’s being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one’s online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.

AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.

Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yy8etm6d

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

What If the Baby Jesus Had Been Born into the American Police State?

Posted: December 23, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?

A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our  modern age?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.

We must do no less.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/6fucv454

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

You’d Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Is Making a List, and You’re On It

Posted: December 4, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake!”
—“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good.

You’ll be on this list whether you like it or not.

Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State.

Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Drones. Contact tracing apps. License plate readers. Social media vetting. Surveillance towers.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Tracking you based on your phone and movements: Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Tracking you based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

Tracking you based on your behavior: Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Tracking you based on your spending and consumer activities: With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every X/Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business, a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Tracking you based on your social media activities: Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your social network: Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

Tracking you based on your car: License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Tracking you based on your mail: Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer. And they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.

Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yfhkyk6k

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches

Posted: October 15, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”—Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Consider for yourselves:

  • Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
  • SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
  • The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
  • Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
  • For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
  • Censorship hasn’t stopped.
  • The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
  • Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
  • The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
  • The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
  • Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
  • The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
  • The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
  • The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
  • And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”

The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.

In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%. 

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdzkuxwr

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Hidden Agendas: Beware of the Government’s Push for a Digital Currency

Posted: September 24, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

This is what comes of those $1.2 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough (case in point: the endless stopgap funding deals and constant ratcheting up of the debt ceiling), so the government has to keep introducing new plans to empower its agents to seize Americans’ bank accounts.

Make way for the digital dollar.

Whether it’s the central bank digital currency favored by President Biden, or the cryptocurrency being hawked by former President Trump, the end result will still be a form of digital money that makes it easier to track, control and punish the citizenry.

For instance, weeks before the Biden Administration made headlines with its support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation: digital money cops), a virtual asset exploitation unit tasked with investigating crypto crimes and seizing virtual assets, and a crypto czar to oversee it all.

No surprises here, of course.

This is how the government operates: by giving us tools to make our lives “easier” while, in the process, making it easier for the government to crack down.

Indeed, this shift to a digital currency is a global trend.

More than 100 other countries are considering introducing their own digital currencies.

China has already adopted a government-issued digital currency, which not only allows it to surveil and seize people’s financial transactions, but can also work in tandem with its social credit score system to punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). As China expert Akram Keram wrote for The Washington Post, “With digital yuan, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] will have direct control over and access to the financial lives of individuals, without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities. In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists.”

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows.

Inevitably, a digital currency will become part of our economy and a central part of the government’s surveillance efforts.

Combine that with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives that are tantamount to social media credit scores for corporations, and you will find that we’re traveling the same road as China towards digital authoritarianism. As journalist Jon Brookin warns: “Digital currency issued by a central bank can be used as a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions.”

As such, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” has been sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and even COVID-19 germs.

In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.

According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

This is how a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).

Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the shift to a cashless society is really not a hard sell for a society increasingly dependent on technology for the most mundane aspects of life.

In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.

At one time, it was estimated that smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by 2020. Since then, growing numbers of businesses have adopted no-cash policies, including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies, restaurants and retail stores. In Sweden, even the homeless and churches accept digital cash.

Making the case for a digital wallet, journalist Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that there’s no longer a need for cash. “More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,” notes Roepe. “PayPal’s app is now accepted at many chain stores including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot. Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps.”

So what’s really going on here?

Despite all of the advantages that go along with living in a digital age—namely, convenience—it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves, data hackers and an all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian corpo-governmental state.

First, when I say privacy, I’m not just referring to the things that you don’t want people to know about, those little things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor harmful but embarrassing or intimate. I am also referring to the things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about, certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies, nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.

Second, we’re already witnessing how easy it will be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own gain in order to track your movements, monitor your activities and communications, and ultimately shut you down. For example, civil asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for police agencies thanks to ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards. In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment for police to scan or swipe your credit card. Expect those numbers to skyrocket once digital money cops show up in full force.

Third, a government-issued digital currency will give the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook. While the government might tout the ease with which it can deposit stimulus funds into the citizenry’s accounts, such a system could also introduce what economists refer to as “negative interest rates.” Instead of being limited by a zero bound threshold on interest rates, the government could impose negative rates on digital accounts in order to control economic growth. “If the cash is electronic, the government can just erase 2 percent of your money every year,” said David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University.

Fourth, a digital currency will open Americans—and their bank accounts—up to even greater financial vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike.

Fifth, digital authoritarianism will redefine what it means to be free in almost every aspect of our lives. Again, we must look to China to understand what awaits us. As Human Rights Watch analyst Maya Wang explains: “Chinese authorities use technology to control the population all over the country in subtler but still powerful ways. The central bank is adopting digital currency, which will allow Beijing to surveil—and control—people’s financial transactions. China is building so-called safe cities, which integrate data from intrusive surveillance systems to predict and prevent everything from fires to natural disasters and political dissent. The government believes that these intrusions, together with administrative actions, such as denying blacklisted people access to services, will nudge people toward ‘positive behaviors,’ including greater compliance with government policies and healthy habits such as exercising.”

Short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. And in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.

At a minimum, before any kind of digital currency is adopted, we need stricter laws on data privacy and an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices by the government and its corporate partners.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the ramifications of any government having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yes3pjbb

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

What’s Next for Battlefield America? Israel’s High-Tech Military Tactics Point the Way

Posted: June 4, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“I did not know Israel was capturing or recording my face. [But Israel has] been watching us for years from the sky with their drones. They have been watching us gardening and going to schools and kissing our wives. I feel like I have been watched for so long.”—Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet

If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel—a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S.—uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.

Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.

We’ve already seen many of these military tactics and technologies deployed on American soil and used against the populace, especially along the border regions, a testament to the heavy influence Israel’s military-industrial complex has had on U.S. policing.

Indeed, Israel has become one of the largest developers and exporters of military weapons and technologies of oppression worldwide.

Journalist Antony Loewenstein has warned that Pegasus, one of Israel’s most invasive pieces of spyware, which allows any government or military intelligence or police department to spy on someone’s phone and get all the information from that phone, has become a favorite tool of oppressive regimes around the world. The FBI and NYPD have also been recipients of the surveillance technology which promises to turn any “target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”

Yet it’s not just military weapons that Israel is exporting. They’re also helping to transform local police agencies into extensions of the military.

According to The Intercept, thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to Israel, “one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here,” as part of an ongoing exchange program that largely flies under the radar of public scrutiny.

A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”

“At the very least,” notes journalist Matthew Petti, “visits to Israel have helped American police justify more snooping on citizens and stricter secrecy. Critics also assert that Israeli training encourages excessive force.”

Petti documents how the NYPD set up a permanent liaison office in Israel in the wake of 9/11, eventually implementing “one of the first post-9/11 counterterrorism programs that explicitly followed the Israeli model. In 2002, the NYPD tasked a secret ‘Demographics Unit’ with spying on Muslim-American communities. Dedicated ‘mosque crawlers’ infiltrated local Muslim congregations and attempted to bait worshippers with talk of violent revolution.”

That was merely the start of American police forces being trained in martial law by foreign nations under the guise of national security theater. It has all been downhill from there.

As Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who has studied the rise of global policing, explains, “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism—all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments. They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”

This ongoing transformation of the American homeland into a techno-battlefield tracks unnervingly with the dystopian cinematic visions of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, both of which are set 30 years from now, in the year 2054.

In Minority Report, police agencies harvest intelligence from widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs in order to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

While Blomkamp’s Elysium acts as a vehicle to raise concerns about immigration, access to healthcare, worker’s rights, and socioeconomic stratification, what was most striking was its eerie depiction of how the government will employ technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to track, target and control the populace, especially dissidents.

With Israel in the driver’s seat and Minority Report and Elysium on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how the American police state will use these emerging technologies to lock down the populace, root out dissidents, and ostensibly establish an “open-air prison” with disconcerting similarities to Israel’s technological occupation of present-day Palestine.

For those who insist that such things are celluloid fantasies with no connection to the present, we offer the following as a warning of the totalitarian future at our doorsteps.

Facial Recognition

Fiction: One of the most jarring scenes in Elysium occurs towards the beginning of the film, when the protagonist Max Da Costa waits to board a bus on his way to work. While standing in line, Max is approached by two large robotic police officers, who quickly scan Max’s biometrics, cross-check his data against government files, and identify him as a former convict in need of close inspection. They demand to search his bag, a request which Max resists, insisting that there is nothing for them to see. The robotic cops respond by manhandling Max, throwing him to the ground, and breaking his arm with a police baton. After determining that Max poses no threat, they leave him on the ground and continue their patrol. Likewise, in Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens and preemptively target suspects for interrogation and containment.

Fact: We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers. This is exactly how Palestinian poet and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha found himself, within minutes of passing through an Israeli military checkpoint in Gaza with his wife and children in tow, asked to step out line, only to be blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, then imprisoned in an Israeli detention center for two days, beaten and further interrogated. Toha was finally released in what Israeli soldiers chalked up to a “mistake,” yet there was no mistaking the AI-powered facial recognition technology that was used to pull him out of line, identify him, and label him (erroneously) as a person of interest.

Drones

Fiction: In another Elysium scene, Max is hunted by four drones while attempting to elude the authorities. The drones, equipped with x-ray cameras, biometric readers, scanners and weapons, are able to scan whole neighborhoods, identify individuals from a distance—even through buildings, report their findings back to police handlers, pursue a suspect, and target them with tasers and an array of lethal weapons.

Fact: Drones, some deceptively small and yet powerful enough to capture the facial expressions of people hundreds of feet below them, have ushered in a new age of surveillance. Not even those indoors, in the privacy of their homes, will be safe from these aerial spies, which can be equipped with technology capable of peering through walls. In addition to their surveillance capabilities, drones can also be equipped with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, tear gas, and tasers.

Biometric scanners and national IDs

Fiction: Throughout Elysium, citizens are identified, sorted and dealt with by way of various scanning devices that read their biometrics—irises, DNA, etc.—as well as their national ID numbers, imprinted by a laser into their skin. In this way, citizens are tracked, counted, and classified. Likewise, in Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on a suspected would-be criminal, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database. The end result is that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide to escape the government’s all-seeing eyes.

Fact: Given the vast troves of data that various world governments, including Israel and the U.S., is collecting on its citizens and non-citizens alike, we are not far from a future where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In fact, between the facial recognition technology being handed out to law enforcement, license plate readers being installed on police cruisers, local police creating DNA databases by extracting DNA from non-criminals, including the victims of crimes, and police collecting more and more biometric data such as iris scans, we are approaching the end of anonymity. It won’t be long before police officers will be able to pull up a full biography on any given person instantaneously, including their family and medical history, bank accounts, and personal peccadilloes. It’s already moving in that direction in more authoritarian regimes.

Predictive Policing

Fiction: In Minority Report, John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime, finds himself identified as the next would-be criminal and targeted for preemptive measures by the very technology that he relies on for his predictive policing. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.

Fact: Precrime, which aims to prevent crimes before they happen, has justified the use of widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and snitch programs. As political science professor Anwar Mhajne documents, Israel has used all of these tools in its military engagements with Palestine: deploying AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories; utilizing facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians; subjecting Palestinians to facial recognition scans at checkpoints, with a color-coded mechanism to dictate who should be allowed to proceed, subjected to further questioning, or detained.

Making the Leap from Fiction to Reality

When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was convinced that there was “still plenty of time” before his dystopian vision became a nightmare reality. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his prophecies were coming true far sooner than he had imagined.

Israel’s military influence on the United States, its advances in technological weaponry, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.

Through its oppressive use of surveillance technology, Israel has erected the world’s first open-air prison, and in the process, has made itself a model for the United States.

What we cannot afford to overlook, however, is the extent to which the American Police State is taking its cues from Israel.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we may not be an occupied territory, but that does not make the electronic concentration camp being erected around us any less of a prison.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/5n73uf7e

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

A Nanny State Idiocracy: A Tale of Too Many Laws and Too Little Freedom

Posted: May 15, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher

We are caught in a vicious cycle of too many laws, too many cops, and too little freedom.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or a Nanny State Idiocracy. 

Whatever the label, this overbearing despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

As the Regulatory Transparency Project explains, “There are over 70 federal regulatory agencies, employing hundreds of thousands of people to write and implement regulations. Every year, they issue about 3,500 new rules, and the regulatory code now is over 168,000 pages long.”

In his CrimeADay Twitter feed, Mike Chase highlights some of the more arcane and inane laws that render us all guilty of violating some law or other.

As Chase notes, it’s against the law to try to make an unreasonable noise while a horse is passing by in a national park; to leave Michigan with a turkey that was hunted with a drone; to refill a liquor bottle with different liquor than it had in it when it was originally filled; to offer to buy swan feathers so you can make a woman’s hat with them; to enter a design in the Federal Duck Stamp contest if waterfowl are not the dominant feature of the design; to transport a cougar without a cougar license; to sell spray deodorant without telling people to avoid spraying it in their eyes; and to transport “meat loaf” unless it’s in loaf form.

In such a society, we are all petty criminals.

In fact, Boston lawyer Harvey Silvergate estimates that the average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal and an inclination on the part of prosecutors to reject the idea that there can’t be a crime without criminal intent. 

The bigger the government grows, the worse the red tape becomes.

Almost every aspect of American life today, including the job sector, is now subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control.

Whereas 70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license, today, almost 1 in 4 American occupations requires a license.

According to business analyst Kaylyn McKenna, more than 41 states require that makeup artists be licensed. Twenty-eight states require a license before you can work as a residential painter. Funeral attendants, whose duties include placing caskets in visitation rooms, arranging flowers and directing mourners, have to be licensed to do so in Kansas, Maine and Massachusetts.

The problem of overregulation has become so bad that, as one analyst notes, “getting a license to style hair in Washington takes more instructional time than becoming an emergency medical technician or a firefighter.”

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal, and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

Case in point: in New Jersey, in what journalist Billy Binion describes as “yet another example of the effects of overcriminalization, which increases interactions between civilians and police with little benefit to actual public safety,” police went so far as to arrest a teenager and seize other teen’s bicycles for so-called traffic violations and a failure to register their bikes with the state.

This is the police state’s superpower: it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

That explains how a fisherman can be saddled with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. Or why police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available. Or how states across the country, in a misguided attempt to disperse homeless populations, have criminalized sitting, sleeping, or resting in public spaces; sharing food with people; and camping in public.

The laws can get downright silly.

For instance, in Florida, it’s against the law to eat a frog that was used in a frog-jumping contest. You could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit, breaking more than three dishes per day, farting in a public place after 6 pm on a Thursday, and skateboarding without a license.

“Such laws,” notes journalist George Will, “which enable government zealots to accuse almost anyone of committing three felonies in a day, do not just enable government misconduct, they incite prosecutors to intimidate decent people who never had culpable intentions. And to inflict punishments without crimes.”

Unfortunately, the consequences are all too serious for those whose lives become grist for the police state’s mill.

In this way, America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation.

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We increasingly find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes. 

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to lockdowns, militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization, overregulation and government corruption.

We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with many doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments.

This is what happens when the American people get duped, deceived, double-crossed, cheated, lied to, swindled and conned into believing that the government and its army of bureaucrats—the people we appointed to safeguard our freedoms—actually have our best interests at heart.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the problem with these devil’s bargains is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4nxxuxxj

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms

Posted: May 8, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen—a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man’s life at will.”—Justice William O. Douglas

The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a free people.

The weapons of this particular war on the privacy and sanctity of our homes are being wielded by the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries.

Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting virtual home invasions using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, aerial drones, and other monitoring devices.

Just recently, in fact, the Michigan Supreme Court gave the government the green light to use warrantless aerial drone surveillance to snoop on citizens at home and spy on their private property.

While the courts have given police significant leeway at times when it comes to physical intrusions into the privacy of one’s home (the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.), the menace of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment rights has barely begun to be litigated, legislated and debated.

Consequently, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Indeed, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this surveillance age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

Without our realizing it, the American Police State passed the baton off to a fully-fledged Surveillance State that gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like an electronic prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices become government informants, reporting independently on anything you might do that runs afoul of the Nanny State.

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

Once technology is able to access and act on your thoughts, not even your innermost thoughts will be safe from the Thought Police.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug. Yet when the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

To our detriment, we are fast approaching a world without the Fourth Amendment, where the lines between private and public property are so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic—the hallmark of a healthy and free society—has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, none of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the electronic concentration camp.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/uezfx4t9

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

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