Depressed that suddenly America is no longer the land of the free? The first amendment has become “quaint.” Instead of fourth amendment protections, we are now the most surveilled among advanced nations in the world.
Not a new phenomenon, American history is replete with examples of the government tightening the control screws using the pathetic excuse of “preserving our democracy.” This phenomenon occurs as the executive branch, usually with the aid of congress, gins up public hysteria over threats to the “homeland.” After 9/11 government officials (Republicans and Democrats alike) went on a rampage destroying constitutionally protected civil rights of citizens. Free speech, the prime victim of this crusade.
Sound familiar? War as an excuse to create a surveillance state. Rewind the tape one hundred years to America’s entrance into World War I in 1917 and hear democratic President Woodrow Wilson running on the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war. One year later, Wilson declared war and passed the Selective Service Act drafting young American men into the military.
History repeated itself as fifty years later, another democrat, Lyndon Johnson, swore: “…we are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys [in Vietnam] ought to be doing for themselves.” By 1968, there were more than 550,000 U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. 1968 was the year many Americans woke up and demonstrated against the war. In response, the government rolled out Cointelpro, an FBI operation that targeted individuals and groups the government considered “subversive” including antiwar protestors, feminists, the black panthers and the entire pantheon of civil rights and social activist groups. Using time-tested methods, surveillance and infiltration, the FBI managed to disrupt and discredit them in the eyes of most Americans.
1917 was also the beginning of the government’s most extreme assault against mass opposition to the wars it starts. Led by a democratic administration, it labeled as political dissidents those who disagreed with the U.S. entering World War I. Included among them were immigrant communities, labor activists and blacks. Without due process, police raids were conducted on these groups and individuals resulting in mass imprisonment, deportations, vigilante violence and in a harrowing precursor to the aftermath of 911, torture.
In 1917, the Selective Service Act (the draft) was added to the surveillance mix. It gave the Wilson administration the young bodies it needed to fight the war. But it was also a surveillance tool. In the words of Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, one of a very few progressive-minded senators, the Selective Service Act allowed the state to “enter at will every home in our country [and] “require [young men] under penalty of death…to wound and kill other young boys just like themselves.” That’s not the rosy spin Woodrow Wilson and every succeeding president (most of them democrats) who dragged the U.S. into a war put on it. No indeed. “It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling. It is rather selection from a Nation which has volunteered in mass.” [Woodrow Wilson]
The draft was one of the first attempts by the government to surveil its people en masse by making it mandatory for all men between 18-45 to register for the draft. Registration gave the government detailed personal information on American men in the prime of their lives, a time when, from the paranoid vision of some government officials, they posed the biggest threat to business as usual. Although Nixon abolished the draft in 1973, men between the ages of 18-25 living in the U.S. are still required to submit their personal information to the government.
The Wilson’s administration’s greatest gift to permanently installing the surveillance state as the law of the land was the 1917 Espionage Ac. Having nothing to do with espionage, it set out to criminalize organizations like Communists, Socialists, even Black groups that disagreed with government decisions like going to war and overturning the governments of sovereign countries. Of the 2000 cases prosecuted, only ten turned out to be espionage.
Jumping ahead almost one hundred years, another “progressive” democrat, Barack Obama, succeeded in putting eight Americans in jail (more than the combined total of all previous presidents after Wilson). In its latest iteration, the Espionage Act makes no distinction between a person who discloses information potentially harmful to U.S. national security and a person who discloses information to help the press expose illegal government programs. Bye, bye freedom of the press.
As the US takes ever more draconian measures to criminalize speech it doesn’t approve of, enter Joe Biden’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism.” Released in June of 2021, as a new Patriot Act on steroids, the strategy expands the government’s surveillance powers to increase the monitoring of social media and implements new screening policies applied to government and law enforcement employees.
Even that wasn’t enough. Biden continued huffing and puffing about threats to “our democracy.” Threats so severe, he claimed, that another law, the Restrict Act was proposed. Under the guise of preserving “our democracy,” it shreds most of Americans’ first (free speech) and fourth amendment (unreasonable searches and seizures) rights potentially criminalizing any app, piece of hardware or software from outside the U.S. that in the judgment of officials poses a risk to national security. It doesn’t take a civil rights lawyer to see where this is going.
Wait, there’s more. After two failed attempts, a bipartisan group of senators (yep, democrats are enthusiastic supporters) are working to pass the Earn It Act which creates an unelected government commission replete with law enforcement goons whose job it is to create “best practices” (in the eyes of the surveillance state) for running a web site or app. The act legalizes draconian punishments by making child sexual abuse (which it always finds) part of the “crime”.
Of all the surveillance techniques the government relies upon the most draconian may well be that monster known as “digital currency” which will eventually criminalize the use of cash. The apotheosis of surveillance it gives the government the ability to spy on every purchase a consumer makes. Think it will never happen here? It’s already starting. The next time you visit your doctor’s office (particularly if it’s part of a corporate-owned practice) you may be informed that the office no longer accepts cash.
The last hundred years of American history have seen the slow and steady erosion of Americans’ civil rights. Increasing centralized power and control helped on by the advance of technology make it possible for the government to invade every part of what used to be off limits— your private life. In some ways democrats are more to blame than republicans. All Democratic presidents since 1945 —Truman, Carter, Clinton, Obama and now Biden joined Republican Presidents — Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes, and Trump in assaults on the Constitution. They didn’t do it alone. Much of their power, then as now, comes from the rise of the U.S. intelligence services now numbering an astounding eighteen. Does a country which is 4% of the world’s population need eighteen intelligence agencies to keep it safe? You decide.
As governmental invasions into the lives of millions of Americans reaches new heights of repression with Americans being jailed for speech crimes, isn’t it time for the American people to stop sugar coating reality and start mobilizing to usher in a new era of social activism? Perhaps it’s time to kick both parties to the curb and build a new party based on constitutional principles. “Stand up, stand up; you’ve been sitting way too long.” [Ralph Nader]
