Posted: July 28th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Big Brother | Tags: Big Brother, Freedom of Information Act, fusion centers, George W. Bush, innocent people, obama, police state, surveillance agents, terrorism | No Comments »
The surveillance state.
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”
What is a fusion center?
The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.
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Posted: January 18th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Big Brother, Media, Politics, The Fed | Tags: Big Brother, Bill of Rights, Constitution, Executive Order, fascism, Fourth Amendment, Freedom of Information Act, immunities, International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol, Justice Department, Media, obama, rule of law, The Fed | 1 Comment »
“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” ~ James Madison
Over the course of his first year in office, Barack Obama has shown himself to be a skillful and savvy politician, saying the things Americans want to hear while stealthily and inexorably moving forward the government’s agenda of centralized power. For example, in one breath, Obama pays lip service to the need for greater transparency in government, while in another, he issues an executive order that will result in even more government secrecy.
He is aided in this Machiavellian mindset by a trusting populace inclined to take him at his word and a mainstream media seemingly loath to criticize him or scrutinize his actions too closely. A perfect example of this is the media’s relative lack of scrutiny over Obama’s recent transformation of Executive Order (EO) 12425 from a document that constitutionally limits the International Criminal Police Organization’s (Interpol) activities domestically to one that establishes it as an autonomous police agency within the U.S.
Those who have voiced their concerns about this domestic empowerment of Interpol by President Obama – and that’s exactly what it is – have been soundly criticized for fomenting political hysteria. But there is legitimate cause for concern. This presidential directive could undermine civil liberties and render the Fourth Amendment null and void.
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