1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Cypherpunks claimed to have all the solutions,
apparently they were worthless liars, lol.

Wake the fuck up. Revolt.


Everybody's Guilty: To The Police State, We're All Criminals Until We
Prove Otherwise

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute

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

    “In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is
getting caught.”
    - Hunter S. Thompson

The burden of proof has been reversed.

No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless
we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of
law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid
proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or
liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due
process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist
and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as
criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of
laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in
the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from
people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity
as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed
as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of
every American whether or not they own a weapon.

Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government
has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with
“anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who
might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could
be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to
render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by
association. In the government’s latest assault on those who criticize
the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed
or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those who share “false
or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of
mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This latest government
salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and
mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is
exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government
narrative. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that
are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a
domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In this way, government
and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous,
disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to
preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s
stranglehold over our lives.

Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government
agencies have increasingly invested in 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. Where many Americans go wrong is in
naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or
harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of
intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to
end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened
scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates),
surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter,
drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express
yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military,
disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work,
purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating
lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or
whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything
remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control
or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government
authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the
weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion
centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police,
lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state
based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other
characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not
just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think
that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of
behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to
whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the
Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called
illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire
populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging
security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat
downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called
“soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth
Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined
surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement,
track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and
catalogue their transactions.

Surveillance, precrime programs. 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
warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time,
whether or not they have committed a crime. 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. With the increase in
precrime programs, threat assessments, AI algorithms and surveillance
programs such as SpotShotter, which attempt to calculate where illegal
activity might occur by triangulating sounds and images, the burden of
proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders
us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all
lawbreakers.

Mail surveillance. 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.”

Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing
list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of
ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that
could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled
potential enemies of the state. 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.

No-knock raids. No-knock, no-announce SWAT team raids are what passes
for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to
any one of us. Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break
down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first),
damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those
unlucky enough to be present during a raid. No longer reserved
exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly
being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a
search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five
times a day. Police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids
every year nationwide.

Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized
cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to
decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly
they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and
protect.” It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s
the same scenario being played out over and over again in which
government agents, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in
their interactions with the public, ride roughshod over the rights of
the citizenry. This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where
the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity
and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of
law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the
people” like suspects and criminals.

Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the
border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect,
paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes,
intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all
without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S.
population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep,
Constitution-free zone.

Asset forfeiture schemes. Americans no longer have a right to private
property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your
doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your
family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to
the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts,
homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption
that they have been associated with some criminal scheme. As
libertarian Harry Browne observed, “Asset forfeiture is a mockery of
the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to
prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury
trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a
court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all
your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been
taken.”

Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at
keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could
quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to
put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void
the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions
against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every
driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the
government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut
it off altogether. The message: we cannot be trusted to obey the law
or navigate the world on our end.

Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called
guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The
debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from
forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies,
forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA
extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric
databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be
reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of
innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during
an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with
these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s
conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space,
specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric,
mental, emotional) of the human race. “Guilt by association” has taken
on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over
genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside
the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless
searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks,
because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create
a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

Limitations on our right to move about freely. We think we have the
freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn,
we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and
restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our
movements. For instance, 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, police can 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 suspects only to
end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

The war on cash and the introduction of digital currency. 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. 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. A cashless
society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and
locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its
corporate partners).

The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or
otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work
opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at
taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. What this
has amounted to is a war on the American people, fought on American
soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded
determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in
order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield. As a
result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants,
to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all
manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled,
censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and
killed.

These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society
where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must
be preemptively rendered harmless.

The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental
due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a
target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where
a crime takes place.

The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it
won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to
the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the
government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the
time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the
nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no
access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair
Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.