In my last post I looked at our government's massive surveillance apparatus and wondered whether that made America resemble an Orwellian State. While the capability for complete obliteration of privacy exists, there's not enough transparency in our government to tell how such capabilities are being used. This violates a key aspect of Orwellian surveillance - knowledge of the surveillance creates complicity through paranoia.
Today I turn my attention to mechanisms of state control over our daily life. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell creates a society where even the daily activities of individuals are regimented and dictated by the state. Initially, America seems to be free from all such control - we can move about the country freely. We have choices in where to work and how to spend our money. We form relationships voluntarily. I am tempted to make connections to public schooling and the oath of fealty we force all children to swear each day but it is a weak form of control at best.
I think we need to look at some larger trends in order to see how the country is changing and how individuals are losing influence over their own lives.
The first big trend is Occupy Wall Street - or, more accurately, the coordinated response against OWS. I posted a few videos at the end of October about the Rough Treatment of Occupy Protesters. It was those videos which motivated me to write this series of posts. I'd like to point out something I wrote:
The move to crush the protests is on. Atlanta just evicted hundreds from Woodruff park and arrested around 50 protesters. Police forces nationwide are trying to deny any living space to the protesters in the hope that they will fade away this winter.
That now appears to be exactly what has happened. In every major center of protest, the police cleared the tents and living spaces. They've denied them shelter so that the protesters have a much harder time occupying. What I didn't expect was the hand of the federal government in crushing the protests. It now appears that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI coordinated these raids with local law enforcement:
Rick Ellis of the Minneapolis edition of Examiner.com has this, based on a “background conversation” he had with a Justice Department official on Monday night:Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.[...]According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.
Corroborated by this AP story. We've also seen attacks on student protesters at Berkeley and police using military weapons and armor when clearing a protest near UNC Chapel Hill:
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| This is just like Modern Warfare 3 but you're shooting poor people with rubber bullets instead of Russians with real ones. |
These tactics were employed along with a media blackout designed to hide any police abuses like those that have been floating around You Tube and nightly news broadcasts since the protests began. All reporters were kept out of the area near Zuccotti Park - except of course the New York Times which was embedded with
Despite all their efforts, videos of the NYPD raid and police actions in other cities continue to make their way on to the internet. (Wow, You Tube assigns commercials to videos that reach a certain amount of views - the commercial I just saw was for Monsanto. Ugh.)
Thankfully, the internet allows for free exchange of information and ideas. Thankfully it allows people all over the world to expose and resist such thuggery by police and governments. Much of the material I've linked so far has been from the You Tube or Twitter accounts of people involved in or covering the OWS movement. Even when the media are ordered out, we still gain first person accounts of the events.
Yeah. About that:
PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Congress is considering a bill written for and designed by the entertainment and telecommunications industries which will grant unprecedented censorship powers to both the government and to those corporations. I've already documented that these companies have a long history of cooperation with our intelligence agencies (like the Department of Homeland Security). All that's required is an accusation by any company and the government gains the authority to shut down an entire domain (for example, www.youtube.com is a domain). While the spirit of the bill is to prevent piracy, it creates the legal standing needed to actively censor social media, video sites, and even news outlets during critical events. Sure, a judge may toss out the law some time down the road but it will be years before such a case is fully litigated (probably all the way to SCOTUS).
Pictures like this will be subject to censorship:
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| That lady is pregnant. http://today.seattletimes.com/2011/11/police-arrest-4-occupy-seattle-marchers |
It also means I can't make and post videos like this:
What does this mean as part of the Orwellian State analysis? Well, I'd say that coordinated coercive actions by the government designed to quash free speech and destroy dissent are hallmarks of an Orwellian State. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the thought police also created false scenarios to detect those who had wavering or weak commitment to the state. Winston was tricked by a member of the Inner Party into believing he was joining an underground group which resists the state. In the end, he is exposed and learns the entrapment was a strategy frequently used to preempt open dissent. America doesn't do anything like that, right?
Wrong. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies routinely use surveillance to identify immigrants and Americans who they consider at risk for radicalization. Then, the FBI contacts these individuals (who have never previously taken any actions) and proceeds to radicalize them. Then, they design a plot to do something terrible, like blow up a Christmas tree, and ask the newly state-radicalized "terrorist suspect" to participate. At the last moment, they make the big reveal: Surprise! We were the FBI all along. Enjoy your water-boarding in Cuba you Christmas hating terrorist mother fucker!
How many times has this happened? We don't know. But there have been some high profile cases that the Justice Department and FBI have paraded around in front of the media to show us how good of a job they're doing at defeating the plots they themselves create.
Last year, the FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to months of encouragement, support and money and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a Press Release boasting of its success. In late 2009, the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, to bomb the Washington Metro. And now, the FBI has yet again saved us all from its own Terrorist plot by arresting 26-year-old American citizen Rezwan Ferdaus after having spent months providing him with the plans and materials to attack the Pentagon, American troops in Iraq, and possibly the Capitol Building using “remote-controlled” model airplanes carrying explosives.
And we can't forget the super super dangerous used car salesman who was plotting to act as a liaison between the Iranians and the Zetas drug cartel in order to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador the US.
This scenario sounds almost exactly like something out of an Orwellian nightmare. Does the state control our daily lives? No. Day to day decision making is still relatively autonomous. But our free speech is under attack. Our access to publicly available information is decreasing. Our ability to peaceably assemble and share those experiences is eroding at the behest of private industry. Worse still, our domestic intelligence services use entrapment and trickery to create criminals out of individuals who exist on the margins of society - individuals who are America citizens, who are guaranteed rights under the constitution, and who have done nothing wrong until the FBI makes them do it. These people are locked away under emergency powers granted in the Patriot Act and never heard from again.
If someone approaches you after reading this post and offers you a chance to fight back against the government, say no. Chances are they work for the government.
As I clicked the "Preview" button for this post, a grey bar appeared at the top of my Chrome browser. It informed me that Blogger would like to know my physical location. I clicked "Deny". Maybe I was wrong about that whole complicity through paranoia thing.
Tomorrow I'll post my next discussion - The Two Minutes Hate: Is America a Soft Orwellian State?
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