by J.B. Shurk
- Almost all private companies have now entered the “spy business.”
- In the old days, television and movie studios wanted to know what you watch; today, everybody wants to know what you watch, what you like, what you do, where you go, and with whom you go there. In turn, all this information is ultimately used to manipulate human behavior.
- US Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, recently confirmed that state and federal governments regularly purchase Americans’ personal data from private companies, so that they may “spy on and track the activities of U.S. citizens.” No kind of personal information is off-limits. Government agents use data brokers to collect information on an individual’s GPS location, mobile phone movements, medical prescriptions, religious affiliations, sexual practices, and much more. It is the type of total surveillance, Rep. Rodgers alleged, that “you would expect out of the Chinese Communist Party surveillance state, not in America.” Yet it is all arguably legal or in an unregulated gray zone.
- “A report published last month by the Brennan Center for Justice found at least twelve overlapping DHS programs for tracking what Americans are saying online,” demonstrating that the DHS had “veered from its original counterterrorism mission into tracking social and political movements and monitoring First Amendment-protected activity of American citizens.” — Senator Rand Paul, April 18, 2023.
- In a particularly shocking example that seemed eerily reminiscent of atrocities committed by Hitler Youth chapters during the 1930s or young schoolchildren during China’s Cultural Revolution, Paul noted, “In 2021, DHS even put out a video encouraging children to report their own family members to Facebook for disinformation if they challenge the U.S. government narratives on COVID-19.”
- Right now… the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is busy capitalizing on recent Pentagon leaks to advance the RESTRICT Act, a piece of legislation that would give the Executive Branch even greater authority to track online communication and label information shared on the Internet as “dangerous.” Known derisively as an “online Patriot Act,” that power grab would come in handy for the government’s domestic surveillance operations during an era when former FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS spooks are filling the ranks of social media companies and the FBI continues to flag more words as online evidence of potential “violent extremism.”
- [D]ozens of members of Congress and their families recently sold off bank shares while they were actively meeting with regulators amid the volatile financial climate prompted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
- As part of the military’s “signature reduction” program, the Pentagon even regularly hides forces carrying out clandestine assignments within private companies under false names. Due to the government’s increased reliance on contractors, a small number of corporate firms now dominate the private intelligence industry.
- You put all these trends together and you get an expansive corporate-government partnership with vast surveillance powers conducting domestic espionage on American citizens — free from legal scrutiny and done in the name of “national security.”
- Read more…