"It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist." — Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype
© The Nation
This government of Peeping Toms is watching
everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing.
This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an
omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government — the Surveillance State — that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.
Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were
carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.
Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government's growing network of snitches and spies.
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."
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