Leaks of the National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM scheme and other surveillance shows a grimly pervasive level of intrusion into the lives of virtually all Americans. If there was to be a silver lining, it’s that unlike the all-seeing governments of dystopian fiction, the NSA doesn’t have any actual police powers, and DC bureaucracies are notoriously unwilling to share information with one another.
That could be a thing of he past too, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is already a national secret police agency, is hoping to get the exact same surveillance powers as the NSA.
The DHS has been proactive in cracking down on the Internet in the past, moving against Bitcoins and seizing wrestling websites through their ICE force, which is itself meant to be an immigration enforcement faction.
Giving the DHS and their hundreds of millions of bullets access to the private information of all Americans is the surest way imaginable to ensure that the abusive surveillance will directly lead to abusive police actions.
Oh I'm sure they do, let's just give every "agent" on the street direct access to all the servers and the power to write their own FISA warrants before they kill all the members of households during their wrong-address nightraids,
As Solzhenitsyn wrote: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"