Congress OK’s Production For Thousands Of Surveillance Drones That Threaten Civilian Privacy
It’ll be a big day when the first drone strike on American citizens on American soil ends up happening. They’ll probably try it against some meth lab or something most people would agree is “deserving”. That way the lefties and moderates will say it was a good thing we have a president who “defends” us.
Brave new world.
Podcast: Law Enforcement Anxious for UASs
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Sadly, it seems this cannot be used as a campaign issue since Congress apparently initiated the issue.
I wonder if they would take a couple of us Freepers.
Every day it is feeling more and more likes "It's Over"...
AHA! So that's what Stalin was relating to FDR and Churchill at Yalta!
AHA! So that's what Stalin was relating to FDR and Churchill at Yalta!
Yeah their willing to use them on American citizens but they won’t send them to the Mexican border to keep the illegals out.
I wish they would stop citing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, because the truth of the matter is that by 1984, we were already to the level of surveillance and government intrusion found in that book.
And it hasn’t gotten better since. In fact, it is now a hundred times worse.
So think of the sequel, call it “Twenty-twelve”, as a new benchmark for obsessive and futile government *and* private voyeuristic surveillance, dossiers, databases and data mining.
It is oppressive and evil. You betcha. But probably the worst part about it is that when government is unwilling or unable to do its job—the big stuff—it spends vast amounts of time and labor fussing with petty and stupid data accumulation.
Government officials always tell themselves that, by doing this, it will “make their job easier”, and accomplish some nebulous and positive goal. The truth is that it just clutters society with stupid and useless data, at great cost, while the big stuff is ignored. Nothing good ever comes from it.
So why is America $14T in debt? Simple, because government *truly cares* about your toilet paper consumption on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. They *truly care* about the names some old cat lady has given her 23 cats.
Because if they didn’t fuss with nonsense like that, the public would demand that they do something about important things, and that is the last thing they care about.
May good for a little skeet shooting. What I don’t like is red light cameras. Because running a light is all I ever do wrong.
Drone to monitor Ava’s gas consumption ping!
My local community many years ago decided it needed helicopters because helicopters for the police were the latest police fad. After several years of considerable expense they decided that they accomplished nothing except catch petty crime and disposed of them. The humor in this will be the police videos of them using their new drone toy to follow a drunk staggering down the road, or the videos of the rooftop angle of the outside of a house some idiot has locked himself in with a gun. I can see the headlines now, “Truant Schoolboy Caught Lying Under Tree!”. The television news will treat these with great gravity and the Internet will be filled with humorous videos, it will be a cosmic farce at the expense of the taxpayer. The intrusion upon and erosion of our freedoms has happened while everybody wasn’t looking this is just another thing on the pile. I think if anybody has looked at the satellite image of their house on Google, been caught by a traffic camera or found out about people on their computer the loss of privacy and freedom becomes apparent.
It's long past high time to set up a good 4th Amendment case to deal with aerial surveillance by local government.
They may come but find many people aren’t home anymore.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2481992/posts?page=1
You can bet your ass that local jurisdictions will be outfitting these things with radar, and mailing out speeding tickets!
Crafted by the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, co-chaired by former DHS chief Michael Chertoff and composed of a who’s who of national security figures, the report outlines a total mission creep, as the title “Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission” implies.
Significantly, it puts on paper and into the Congressional record a proposed transition from outwardly dealing with the threats posed by terrorism towards intelligence gathering “focused on more specific homeward-focused areas.” That is, the homegrown, domestic threats we’ve heard so much about from Big Sis already.
In short, it confirms the intentions of key insiders– including former NSA/CIA head Michael Hayden, former Rep. Jane Harmon, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, 9/11 Commissioners Philip Zelikow and Richard Ben-Viniste, former National Security Advisor Samuel Berger and others– to flesh out a plan we have already seen developing from an outside perspective– namely, to build a domestic Stasi-like force to takeover, monitor and control the population.
James O’Keefe needs some drones to keep an eye on Congressmen and their trips to their drug dealers and mistresses.
How high do these thing fly and can they be shot down with a deer rifle?