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We, The Targeted: How Government Weaponizes Surveillance To Silence Its Critics
Rutherford Institute ^ | 08/30/2023 | John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on 08/30/2023 10:00:05 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

- President Harry S. Truman

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

This last point is particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.

Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.

Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.

They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.


TOPICS: Conspiracy; Government; Society
KEYWORDS: government; policestate; spying; surveillance; tyranny

1 posted on 08/30/2023 10:00:05 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Spooky stuff.

We live in interesting times, indeed.

I noticed just now that part of my post auto-completed. I guess I’m already being surveilled. :-)


2 posted on 08/30/2023 10:18:53 PM PDT by Nervous Tick (Jesus is LORD and Savior! And Donald Trump is President of the United States of America.)
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To: SeekAndFind
The Utah Data Center (UDC), code-named Bumblehive, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is one of four of our nations data storage facilities. It is located in Bluffdale. It has over one million square feet with large water storage tanks, cooling towers, and chiller plants. Some reports estimate that it requires 1.7 million gallons of water per day to cool its storage hardware.

The supercomputer that processes and stores all this data is called "Cascade," and it's capable of computing 100,000 trillion calculations per second. The system stores all text messages, phone calls, website visits, Internet searches, emails, credit card information, travel information, legal documents, financial information, and health records.


3 posted on 08/30/2023 10:55:22 PM PDT by jonrick46 (Leftniks chase illusions of motherships at the end of the pier.)
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To: Nervous Tick

I bet the surveillance system knows what you look like naked. LOL! With Biden, the emperor wears no clothes.


4 posted on 08/30/2023 10:59:36 PM PDT by jonrick46 (Leftniks chase illusions of motherships at the end of the pier.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Now also throw in the mix that govt always believes what one gender says about the other gender. A recipe for false charges to provide govt a way to go after people.


5 posted on 08/30/2023 11:26:29 PM PDT by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; not averse to Going Bronson.)
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To: jonrick46

I think I put in the fuel systems on that one. It was like 300k gallons of underground diesel storage.10 miles of pipe.


6 posted on 08/30/2023 11:40:15 PM PDT by waterhill (I Believe!)
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To: jonrick46

“HAL, open the outer gates.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”


7 posted on 08/31/2023 12:56:34 AM PDT by campaignPete R-CT (I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go ...)
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To: SeekAndFind

Anything posted or typed onto the internet is subject matter the government may review.


8 posted on 08/31/2023 12:57:31 AM PDT by no-to-illegals (The enemy has US surrounded. May God have mercy on them.)
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To: Nervous Tick

I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but the local neighborhood unit which covers your area for domestic surveillance already is watching you just because you are here and posting. At least looking over your internet travels periodically. I would bet everything I own, some of the locals have kept an eye on you as you were shopping in the grocery store, at least a few times.

I would give everyone on line behind me at the grocery store a mild stink-eye for a month, as they love to set up there to get a record of everything you buy for your post-follow debrief and overall file. Sooner or later I would bet you would see somebody get real uncomfortable.

You may joke, but you are under that threat already, to a degree you would not believe, because you were taught it wasn’t possible, just to make you more vulnerable. I have seen this stuff, you have no idea. It took me a good seven to ten years, just to process there could be this many Americans who view regular America as a threat and an enemy which needs to be kept down and have their privacy invaded.


9 posted on 08/31/2023 1:52:15 AM PDT by AnonymousConservative (DO NOT send me sensitive information - http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/surveillance)
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To: SeekAndFind

Some good information in this piece except re certain people surveilled in the COINTEL programs. Some were national security threats. Some, not! You have to know the full backgrounds of each individual in order to see why they were under some form of intelligence surveillance or action.

I just wish that the government would, and should have, revealed more information about individuals after a certain period of time when such disclosures would not affect national security.

Why do you think that the late Rep. John Conyers Jr. tried to have all House Committee on Un-American Activities and it’s successor, the House Internal Security Committee, destroyed in 1975?

It would have exposed him as a secret supporter or covert member of the Communist Party as well as possible KGB/GRU asset.

The same thing was done to the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security/Sen. Judiciary Committee re it’s existence.

Attempts were made to destroy the invaluable Military Intelligence Division files but they were saved by a very savvy and patriotic military officer. You wouldn’t believe what they contain, going back to WW I. They are a historian’s archival dream and damming re certain people in America’s modern history.

If you haven’t seen them and other investigative files re national security threats, then you (I.e.) the author of this article, shouldn’t make broad generalizations. You would end up looking like a fool.


10 posted on 08/31/2023 2:30:01 AM PDT by MadMax, the Grinning Reaper (Figures )
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To: Nervous Tick
We live in interesting times, indeed.

We are being driven up the curved lead up alley towards either resistance and slaughter, or submission to the hive mind.

I will remain an individual to the bitter end and whatever the consequences.

11 posted on 08/31/2023 3:50:18 AM PDT by Sirius Lee (They intend to murder us. Prep if you want to live and live like you are prepping for eternal life)
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To: SeekAndFind

Read later.


12 posted on 08/31/2023 4:55:57 AM PDT by NetAddicted (MAGA2024)
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To: SeekAndFind

bkmk


13 posted on 08/31/2023 5:19:50 AM PDT by sauropod (I will stand for truth even if I stand alone.)
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To: jonrick46
That's great! That means they can finally track down the messages that coordinated the voting shutdown on election night in November 2022, and punish the perpetrators.

BRB. Knock at my door . . . .

14 posted on 08/31/2023 5:21:04 AM PDT by Hardastarboard (Don't wish your enemy ill; plan it. // Sure - You're right. Now what is your plan to fix it?)
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To: MadMax, the Grinning Reaper; piasa

Yes, as you say, a mix of good and bad information, it’s important to know the background specifics. This part in particular is problematic:

“Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.”

Briefly, King had been told directly by President Kennedy and RFK to stop associating with Soviet agents Stanley Levison and Hunter “Pitts” O’Dell and refused to comply (which does not excuse some of the illegal tactics used against him but does account for his surveillance); Malcolm X came under surveillance when he became affiliated with the Nation of Islam, which had been of concern since its founder was investigated for Nazi ties, and the Pan-African movement, which was supported by the Soviets; the Black Panther Party was being supported by Fidel Castro; John Lennon came under scrutiny when he started funding the Yippies and the White Panther Party while they were planning riots at the 1972 RNC convention (see my post #131 here: https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1756224/posts?page=131#131); Billie Holiday’s case involved narcotics rather than politics and was initiated by the FBN rather than the FBI; Emma Goldman was a terrorist working directly with Russian anarchists and later the Soviets; Aretha Franklin’s file is a mix of investigations to her ties to Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army type groups and information about threats to her life that were under investigation; Charlie Chaplin was the top financier of the Communist Party in Hollywood starting the 1920s and had high-level ties to leading fellow travelers in California and the UK; Ernest Hemingway belonged to some of Willi Munzenberg’s front groups and fought for the Communists in Spain; and Felix Frankfurter was acting from 1916 to 1937 as an agent of his mentor Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a leader of the socialist movement in Boston who was flagged by Army intelligence in 1920 as a contact of Soviet representative Santeri Nuorteva; Frankfurter helped place numerous Soviet agents—generally recruited from Harvard Law School—in the U.S. government, including Jerome Frank, Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, and others I’ve discussed here: https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1198744/posts. So yeah, it’s important to know the backgrounds. . .


15 posted on 08/31/2023 5:16:48 PM PDT by Fedora
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To: null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; AZ .44 MAG; Baynative; bgill; bitt; ...

p


16 posted on 08/31/2023 9:11:41 PM PDT by bitt (<img src=' 'width=40%>)
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