Police State

A Police State exists when the Citizens and/or the Rights of Citizens are oppressed by the government through processes and/or techniques that monitor the population with the intent of control. Some of these techniques, such as using surveillance drones or monitoring all electronic communication, is implemented incrementally and with the excuse that it is in the interest of “national security”.

In Utah, for example, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been building a facility they are calling the Utah Data Center. This $2B project, when it is finished later this year, has the capability to monitor and analyze all electronic communications in the United States, as well as the input from international listening stations. Its storage capabilities are unrivaled in the world, with the possibility of storing yottabytes, where one yottabyte is equal to about 500 quintillion pages of text. It has its own 65 MW substation, which will cost American taxpayers $40M/yr. to Rocky Mountain Power, the local energy company. Yeah, that’s the tough part…We are paying for the technology to spy on ourselves. Thank you, Orrin Hatch and others associated with this endeavor!

So, what kind of information does this “data center” find interesting? Google searches, cell phone conversations and texts, financial transactions, you name it; if information is passed, they will be monitoring it. And, if your name ends up as one of the over 1 million that are on their watch list, correctly or incorrectly, a more focused effort will be implemented and they will know more about you than you do.

This is one of the most blatant examples but it exemplifies the point that our gov’t doesn’t care if you “have nothing to hide”. They will monitor and analyze and make that decision without constitutional process and doing something about it is very difficult, bordering on impossible. Welcome to the Police States of Amerika!

You will also find information on how your own gov’t is using legislation, court action and technology with the goal for ultimate control. As an example, legislation, such as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is generated every year to fund the Department of Defense (Dept. of OFFENSE??), had sections (Sec. 1031 & 1032) added in 2012 that allow for unlimited detention of American Citizens without Due Process, as well as allowing regular US military to act as a law enforcement entity. Both of these, habaeus corpus and posse commitatus, are long-standing protections of Citizens’ Rights, not to mention basic human rights and, with this legislation alone, they have been taken away.

If you want to find out more about the NSA and the Utah Data Center, visit the Wired website article at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/