That guy with the five cans of tuna might just be The Tunabomber. Tell someone NOW! The lady with the heavy flow maxi pads is likely harboring biological weaponry below the belt! Report her before it is too late. Is somebody buying paint thinner? He must be plotting to create a meth lab so he can funnel money back to his Al Qaida overlords! Learn to see the Truth around you so you can help your government keep you safe.
In all seriousness, it is quite alarming IMHO that the DHS has expanded its mission and started seizing US domains to fight piracy because it is such a huge threat to our national security and because it isn't good enough to just have just one federal agency (FBI) handling such an essential task. Now the DHS is putting video screens in public so they can drill their messages of fear and threat levels into us? I have to say that 2010 is shaping up to be a eerily like 1984 what with this and the suspension of our 4th amendment rights every time we fly. Also, the US citizen whose friend's car had an FBI satellite tracking device mounted on it because he made comments about how we have security theater with high security in certain places while, for example, there is very little security to prevent someone from bombing a shopping mall. In our brave new USA, this is enough to get you on a list and have your tax dollars used so that government agents can track you and threaten you if you don't give them back their spy toys.
America, I think we are fucked on a global scale. Politicians like Palin and Tom Flanagan (of Canada) are calling for Julian Assange to be hunted down and assassinated because he showed us factual information that made our government officials embarrassed in an unprecedented act of actual journalism (newspapers and media corporations take note!). Corporations (banks, DNS providers, and server providers) are working with various governments to bring Assange down so he can be prosecuted for sex crimes alleged by a non-credible CIA puppet. As mentioned in my last post, congress has its panties in a bunch because they can't seem to justify the $65 billion dollars required to extend unemployment for millions of Americans while they accept that we have no choice but to cut taxes on the richest folks which will short the Federal government $700 billion dollars in the coming years. Add to this that at such a pivotal time, we have net neutrality evaporating such that we have no guarantees of unrestricted access to information on the web. We will be limited to whatever corporations, who can easily be manipulated by governmental agencies by threats or for special treatment (as this week has shown), decide we should be able to see.
I foresee America slipping into a true Orwellian fate in the next few decades, and nobody in power has any reason to fight it. We will all be docile citizens and employees when everyone is spying on you for their own gain. I suspect people will fondly think to themselves (because talking about it will be too risky) about how things headed downhill after 9/11 and how we should have gotten more upset as the government trampled our freedoms quietly at first and then loudly as they got many of us to think it was for our own good. Hindsight is usually clearer, but it is a maddening time in our nation's history to have foresight.
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. -- Orwell
