1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Didn't Cypherpunks claim they had a solution to 1984?


A Nation Of Snitches: DHS Is Grooming Americans To Report On Each Other

John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/a_nation_of_snitches_dhs_is_grooming_churches_and_schools_to_report_extremists

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/28/how-the-pandemic-has-affected-attendance-at-u-s-religious-services/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other-terror-threat.html
https://archive.adl.org/learn/safety/exident.html
https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx
https://leohohmann.com/2023/09/11/exclusive-homeland-security-awards-20-million-in-grants-to-police-mental-health-networks-universities-churches-and-school-districts-to-help-identify-americans-as-potential-extremists/
https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something/about-campaign
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2023/09/06/nj-new-see-something-say-something-campaign/70780772007/
https://cops.usdoj.gov/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dhs-rebrands-and-expands-biased-ineffective-countering-violent-extremism
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/strong_cities_network_will_foster_collaboration_to_fight_violent_extremism
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/launch-strong-cities-network-strengthen-community-resilience-against-violent-extremism
https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/New-Partnership-to-Help-Fusion-Centers-Streamline-Intelligence-Gathering-Dissemination.html
https://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/u-s-predictive-policing-program-uses-computer-analytics-to-pinpoint-those-most-likely-to-commit-crimes-before-they-happen
https://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes
https://fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf
https://fas.org/irp/eprint/leftwing.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590795229/
https://www.amazon.com/Erik-Blair-Diaries-Battlefield-Dead/dp/1954968027/
https://www.rutherford.org/

    “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just
processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It
wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance
and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people
who were informing on their neighbors.”

    - Professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler

Are you among the 41% of Americans who regularly attend church or some
other religious service?

Do you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government
will soon declare martial law?

Do you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological
bumper stickers on your car?

Are you among the 44% of Americans who live in a household with a gun?
If so, are you concerned that the government may be plotting to
confiscate your firearms?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be an
anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of
the government and flagged for heightened surveillance and preemptive
intervention.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution
(namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with
like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the
government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or
searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government,
racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted
to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

I assure you I’m not making this stuff up.

So what is the government doing about these so-called American “extremists”?

The government is grooming the American people to spy on each other as
part of its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3
program.

According to journalist Leo Hohmann, the government is handing out $20
million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities,
churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying
Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

As Hohmann explains, “Whether it’s COVID and vaccines, the war in
Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and
child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue
of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold
dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do,
your own government will take note and consider you a potential
‘violent extremist’ and terrorist.”

Cue the dawning of the Snitch State.

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the
government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs
combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct,
hyper-vigilant, technologically-wired age.

For more than two decades, the Department of Homeland Security has
plastered its “See Something, Say Something” campaign on the walls of
metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super
Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Colleges,
universities and even football teams and sporting arenas have lined up
for grants to participate in the program.

The government has even designated September 25 as National “If You
See Something, Say Something” Awareness Day.

If you see something suspicious, says the DHS, say something about it
to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using
a convenient app on your smart phone.

This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government’s way of
indoctrinating “we the people” into the mindset that we’re an
extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be
suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens.

This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.

Yet while community policing and federal programs such as “See
Something, Say Something” are sold to the public as patriotic attempts
to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more
than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern
audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that
carries out its own policing.

After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a
nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do
you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough
cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the
country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions,
interactions and movements of every person within the United States?

The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be
your eyes and ears. You hype them up on color-coded “Terror alerts,”
keep them in the dark about the distinctions between actual threats
and staged “training” drills so that all crises seem real, desensitize
them to the sight of militarized police walking their streets,
acclimatize them to being surveilled “for their own good,” and then
indoctrinate them into thinking that they are the only ones who can
save the nation from another 9/11.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be
accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has
done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving
band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to
travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet
tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with
no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

This is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient,
omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a
citizenry against each other.

It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry
remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces
from outside the country, they’re incapable of focusing on more
definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and
its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.

Community policing did not come about as a feel-good, empowering
response to individuals trying to “take back” their communities from
crime syndicates and drug lords.

Rather, “Community-Oriented Policing” or COPS (short for Community
Partnerships, Organizational Transformation, and Problem Solving) is a
Department of Justice program designed to foster partnerships between
police agencies and members of the community.

To this end, the Justice Department identifies five distinct
“partners” in the community policing scheme: law enforcement and other
government agencies, community members and groups, nonprofits,
churches and service providers, private businesses and the media.

Together, these groups are supposed to “identify” community concerns,
“engage” the community in achieving specific goals, serve as
“powerful” partners with the government, and add their “considerable
resources” to the government’s already massive arsenal of technology
and intelligence. The mainstream media’s role, long recognized as
being a mouthpiece for the government, is formally recognized as
“publicizing” services from government or community agencies or new
laws or codes that will be enforced, as well as shaping public
perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime.

Inevitably, this begs the question: if there’s nothing wrong with
community engagement, if the police can’t be everywhere at once, if
surveillance cameras do little to actually prevent crime, and if we
need to “take back our communities” from the crime syndicates and drug
lords, then what’s wrong with community policing and “See Something,
Say Something”?

What’s wrong is that these programs are not, in fact, making America
any safer while turning us into a legalistic, intolerant, squealing,
bystander nation.

We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven,
technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall,
widening mass surveillance dragnet comprised of fusion centers, red
flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, terror watch lists, facial
recognition, snitch tip lines, biometric scanners, pre-crime programs,
DNA databases, data mining, precognitive technology and contact
tracing apps, to name just a few.

This is how the government keeps us under control and in its crosshairs.

By the time you combine the DHS’ “See Something, Say Something” with
CP3 and community policing, which has gone global in the guise of the
Strong Cities Network program, you’ve got a formula for enabling the
government to not only flag distinct “anti-government” segments of the
population but locking down the entire nation.

Under the guise of fighting violent extremism “in all of its forms and
manifestations” in cities and communities across the world, the Strong
Cities Network program works with the UN and the federal government to
train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight
and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their
communities, using all of the resources at their disposal.

What this program is really all about, however, is community policing
on a global scale with the objective being to prevent violent
extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred,
intolerance, etc. In other words, police will identify, monitor and
deter individuals who could be construed as potential extremist
“threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual
threats.

The government’s war on extremists has been sold to Americans in much
the same way that the USA Patriot Act was sold to Americans: as a
means of combatting terrorists who seek to destroy America.

However, as we now know, the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to
advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a
far-reaching domestic spying program that has turned every American
citizen into a criminal suspect.

Similarly, the concern with the government’s ongoing anti-extremism
program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render
otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out
American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and
deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers, data
collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social
media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge
technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing,
biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences
alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

For example, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly
defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are
mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state
or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and
one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal
rights activist groups as extremists.

These reports, which use the words terrorist and extremist
interchangeably, indicate that for the government, anyone seen as
opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in
between—can be labeled an extremist.

Fast forward a few years, and you have the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA), which each successive presidential
administration has continually re-upped, that allows the military to
take you out of your home, lock you up with no access to friends,
family or the courts if you’re seen as an extremist.

Now connect the dots, from the 2009 Extremism reports to the NDAA and
the far-reaching data crime fusion centers that collect and share
surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.

Add in tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon
blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that identifies
and tracks you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to
complete the circle, toss in the real-time crime centers which are
attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they
happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical
algorithms and prognostication programs.

If you can’t read the writing on the wall, you need to pay better attention.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American
People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless
we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion and globalization of
the government’s powers, we’re not going to recognize this country
five, ten—even twenty—years from now.

As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample
our rights in the so-called name of national security, things will get
worse, not better.

It’s already worse.