The Department of Homeland Control

NewsWithViews ^ | Feb 10, 04 | David Brownlow

[SLB]

The six of us finally got our luggage hauled up to the ticket counter only to be told, “You have been selected for an extra security search.” We were yanked from the counter and immediately led over to a very expensive looking line-up of bomb sniffing x-ray machines. As we stood sheepishly under the watchful gaze of the armed, stern- looking TSA employees, all of our bags got a thorough going over.

Now please understand, I certainly do not want any bomb-carrying psychos waltzing onto the flight I am about to board. I really don’t. So I would like to think that somewhere in the great TSA security database there is a profile of a known, potentially dangerous terrorist that would read something like this:

“Be on the lookout for a white, middle aged, heterosexual male, wearing shorts and a stupid looking shirt. Likely to be accompanied by a stunning woman, wearing matching shirt, with four children.”

Because then I would feel better knowing that the intrusive search performed on my family was helping to make the world a safer place. But of course, that is nonsense. The “security” precautions are only a sham, designed to fool us into thinking our government is serious about protecting us.

If securing the homeland were really the objective, then Sec. 102 of the USA Patriot Act would not make the ludicrous argument that “no particular culture, people or religion is responsible for terrorism.” Which is just another way of saying that every single one of us is a suspect. What a total crock!

I don’t know about you, but it is pretty clear to me which cultures, people and religions have a propensity to blow themselves up on their way to martyrdom. And it’s not some guy like me who is just trying to take his family on vacation!

If you and I can figure out which cultures, people and religions pose a danger to us, then our government has figured it out too. So when we are told that a completely random search of all 280 million Americans is an effective way of catching the bad guys, it means they really have no intention of actually catching the bad guys. So just as it is with almost every aspect of our government these days, the Homeland Security Agency is not quite what it appears to be.

The Homeland Security Act, The Patriot Act, and the soon-to-be-unleashed Patriot Act II have very little to do with providing security to the homeland. They have everything to do with providing our government with a myriad of new powers for keeping all of us under control.

Do you feel safer knowing the federal government is snooping around in your private affairs? Do you feel safer knowing the federal government is looking into your spending habits, bank accounts and medical history? Do you feel safer boarding an airplane after you and the elderly couple next to you are strip-searched? Do you feel safer knowing that the emails you write and the web sites you browse are subject to warrantless searches?

It’s not about homeland security. It’s about homeland control!

It is nearly impossible to make the least bit of sense out of the combined 170,000 words of gibberish contained in The Homeland Security Act, The Patriot Act I or The Patriot Act II. In an attempt to make these Acts all the more incomprehensible, much of the verbiage is actually a cryptic modification of other, equally unintelligible laws. It would take an army of researchers just to get all the amended documents together in one place. Which means you can be sure that not a single member of Congress read these Acts before they voted to approve them. Let alone understood the impact of them. If that is not enough, there is another agency lurking about called the TIA, or the Total(itarianism) Information Agency. This is the one where every piece of information about you is fed into a computer that is so huge they had to make up a whole new unit of measure, called the petabyte, to describe the enormous size of the hard drives that will be required to store the mountains of information the TIA is collecting about you. It gets even better. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has just issued contract bids for a new control mechanism called LifeLog. This is going to be a new computer system that will analyze all of our “behavior, habits and routines” in order to “capture each persons experience in and interactions with the world.” Why does our government need to know every detail of our lives? Just what do these people have in store for our Republic?

And not to be forgotten, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS was designed to recruit everyday people to spy on their neighbors and report any suspicious activity to the government. If TIPS had been enacted, there would be roughly one government snoop for every 24 Americans. This would mean that every time the repairman finished fixing your dishwasher, there would be a government report filed about any “suspicious” activities in your house.

The failure of the TIPS program to get enacted last year is irrelevant. They still want it and you can bet that some flavor of TIPS will morph its way back into one of the laws that are part of what has now become an avalanche of new “security” measures How could this be happening in America?

If our government were really serious about homeland security, there would be large men with guns, patrolling our borders in Humvees. There would be some sanity in our immigration and visa issuing policies. We would restore our second amendment rights aboard airplanes, so knife-wielding lunatics will never be able to crash them into buildings again. We would be searching the thousands of shipping containers that enter the country each day. We would ban travel to and from a long list of countries. And we would kick out the bad guys that managed to sneak in - immediately!

But none of those things are even being talked about.

Instead, we need a whole new dictionary just to know the names of all the agencies that are snooping around in our private affairs, as if we are all somehow at fault for the events of 9/11. Things have gone completely nuts!

Understanding the full impact of these new laws is not very likely. There is just too much there for the average person to digest. But then that is exactly the intent! There are enough new restrictions, definitions and coded phrases, such that any one of us could be caught up in this new “homeland security” net without ever knowing what we did wrong!

Take all these new powers, along with the ability to hold Americans captive for indefinite periods without any Constitutional protections, and it becomes clear that our own government is doing more to destroy America than any terrorist organization could ever have hoped to.

Like the pieces in a giant game of chess, the mechanisms to eliminate our few remaining freedoms are rapidly being placed into position. We do not know how long it will be before the inevitable “checkmate” is called.

Let’s hope we can wake up enough people before we get that knock on the door, “We’re here from the Homeland Security Department and we’ll need to see your right hand or your forehead…”

[SLB]

Just the tip of the iceberg on why I hate to fly.

[ovrtaxt]

“Be on the lookout for a white, middle aged, heterosexual male, wearing shorts and a stupid looking shirt. Likely to be accompanied by a stunning woman, wearing matching shirt, with four children.”

Crap! I didn't know they were looking for me too! (Except for the matching shirts-- that's just too dorky for us.)

[SLB]

Crap! I didn't know they were looking for me too! (Except for the matching shirts-- that's just too dorky for us.)

Yep, and OBTW when they haul you away, you stand a better than even chance to have your rights to due process of law taken away.

[skip2myloo]

Ping

Nothing happening here, don't worry, just move along, you're safe, your government is at work

[pageonetoo]

I just flew from Phoenix to BWI, and, as usual, had to wait in interminable lines to get onto the plane, after taking off my shoes, and exposing my bags to a search.

I am a 56 yr old WASP male, with a paunch, and was carrying my bags. I watched several middle-eastern looking fellows, with accents, being passed through, without any ado.

There is NO security capable of stopping terrorism. You can thwart an occasional plan, but those intent on destruction, will destroy!

What is most fearsome, is that we have lost the ability to respond to our g'umt, because now we will be labeled as 'terrorist', if we do anything to remove these shackles...

...meanwhile in New Mexico, blow into that breathalizer, and drive on home! (I have 40 acres in NM that I just put on the market, after buying it last year. I will take a loss, since I am selling quickly after my purchase, but will never go back there, despite planning on living part of the year there...!)

What has happened to America, since 1960? It seems to have disappeared, or to have been molecularly altered into some fascist state!

[George W. Bush]

Expect Patriot I to largely sunset.

Patriot II has no chance.

Many of these stupid airport screening situtations will be dealt with. They won't endure.

[skip2myloo]

Most of Patriot I, in fact DOES NOT sunset, only limited portions of it.

What is the source of your optimism ?? Hope ??

As we all know -- hope is not a method.

[skip2myloo]

No Kidding !!

KABA Writer Investigated for Questioning Civil Authority (Long Read)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1081899/posts

[SLB]

You might want to read Post #6 to this thread and then reconsider.

[George W. Bush]

As we all know -- hope is not a method.

Hope is the sina qua non of reform and progress. It's indisputable.

Let's not jump into doom-and-gloom mode. Sneak-and-peek was knocked out by Congress last year despite severe objections from Bush and Ashcroft. Ashcroft's triumphal tour of, what, 26 cities to promote Patriot II actually aroused even more opposition to it. He rushed back to Washington just to try to get renewal of existing Patriot I provisions. And Congress isn't buying into it. They just don't like it and never really did.

I certainly don't take the threat to our liberties casually. But Patriot was always viewed with suspicion by the saner elements in both parties. They've already hacked at it once. And many of the more onerous provisions will sunset.

Let's not pretend that we've made no progress against it. Or that some of its provisions were not necessary to deal with the Islamist fifth column in the States. I see Patriot as a for-the-duration measure, something that citizens should work to reduce as the threat is dealt with. And I think there is considerable consensus in Congress on that point.

Stay active. Keep the pressure on. We'll chop this thing down to size.

[robowombat]

This is bad enough with Repus in charge imagine what a rat adminiastration would do with these powers. Evangelicals, home schoolers, strong 2nd Amendment supporters, and pro-life groups for just a start would be 'viewed' as possible domestic terrorists. Meanwhile the disgusting truckling to native Islamowhacos would redouble as part of multiculturalism and the blame America first syndrome the rats are all infected with.

[joesnuffy]

All you gotta do is look like a member of the protected class....and you can skate right on through...

What ever you do ..dont look like a disabled world war two veteran...or his wife...

[verity]

"...with a paunch..."

You are being profiled. ;~)

[americanSoul]

Instead, we need a whole new dictionary just to know the names of all the agencies that are snooping around in our private affairs, as if we are all somehow at fault for the events of 9/11. Things have gone completely nuts!

This is very sad. Why are the victims of 9/11 being persecuted? And by their own government yet.

This is happening on Dubya's watch.

[zeugma]

Just the tip of the iceberg on why I hate to fly.

Amen. I refuse to even go into an airport. There is no way I could keep from walking around going "Baaaaaa! Baaaaaa!"

[Mulder]

Welcome to the Sovietized America.

Personally, I refuse to fly so long as Americans are treated like turd-world sheep at the airports.

[zeugma]

I think you are wrong on all three counts. If anything of any substance in the "P-1" actually does sunset, I'll eat my hat. P-2 is already being passed. Parts were passed just last month. Rather than being a single bill that can be pointed to as an evil bit of offal though, it is being implemented bit by bit as riders to other bills.

I don't ever expect to fly again. The rediculous procedures are just going to be accepted (already have by the sheep) of being "normal".

[MrB]

If securing the homeland were really the objective, then Sec. 102 of the USA Patriot Act would not make the ludicrous argument that “no particular culture, people or religion is responsible for terrorism.”

ridiculous.

PC, "liberalism", multi-culturalism, and "diversity sensitivity" are going to get thousands killed.

[Don Joe]

And many of the more onerous provisions will sunset.

Just like the AWB, right?

And to think I was even concerned about it!

Whew!

Thanks for setting our minds at ease.

Meanwhile, until such time as it "sunsets" (I'm thinking we'll know when that happens, because of all the weather reports of global cooling in hell, and news bulletins about massive numbers of cows mysteriously returning to their ancestral homepastures), you might want to peruse some of the nightmares your countrymen are enduring:

This guy made the mistake of... obeying the law: Airport follies

This guy made the mistake of stopping by the side of the road for a cigarette: Welcome to Humboldt County. Papers, Please.

And this one takes the cake -- an airport that essentially declares itself a sovereign state, above the law (oh, don't worry -- it writes its own laws), and then, declares that it has jurisdiction over everyone for something like a six mile radius -- even people legally driving down the road (say, from work to home), minding their own business, nowhere near the airport: VCDL hits Sovereign Nation of MWAA in press! (If you object, don't worry. They have their own laws, remember. They'll allow you to file an FOIA. It'll only cost you a bit over $12,000 in FOIA "fees" to get them to provide the info you need to attempt to challenge their divine rule over you.)

Yup, everything's gonna be just fine. Move along, folks, nothing to see here. But as long as you are here, we've got a few questions for you. I'm sure you'll cooperate, jawohl?