Calling All Patriots...
by Bob Bauman
Picture the average American male. Iet's call him George.
George is married with two small children and works as a business manager at a technology company. He's well-liked in his office and is a doting father and husband in his private life. George loves his gadgets and is up on all of the latest technology. He's lost without his Galaxy 4 smartphone and plays on his iPad before he goes to sleep every night. Tweeting, texting and web surfing are second nature to George.
And because of his harmless habits, George is now in the crosshairs of the United States government.
In the last week, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights took two more major hits:
- The National Security Agency (NSA) has been exposed as collecting information on all U.S. telephone calls via the Verizon network that's about 3 billion phone calls per day. Other phone networks are suspect as well.
- The Washington Post exposed the PRISM project in which the NSA and FBI tap directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, [Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple] extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets. (And the government expects us to believe such activity doesn't include domestic targets?)
We have now arrived at the moment of tyrannical government overreach that I have been warning my readers about for years. No longer can the average American sit idly by in disappointment as our fundamental rights are violated.
We must all take action now.
A False Security
Astoundingly, some short-sighted politicians in both parties are attacking those brave Americans who pulled back the curtains on our government of lies and spies. But others have been brave enough to step forward in defense of our liberty. Senator Mark Udall (D-Co), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated: "There is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans."
This means that it's possible for the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and, eventually, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to access innocent George's chat room discussions, emails, phone calls, texts and gather them all in government computers in a massive game of police state gotcha! This should worry you because George's communications habits are probably very similar to yours.
And does anyone really believe that these 'security' programs will be used carefully by a government in which the IRS targets and persecutes politically conservative groups, where the Department of Justice targets journalists for surveillance, where FATCA destroys offshore investment rights or where the highest officials lie about what really happened at Benghazi?
John W. Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, says (and I agree) that "the American ideal of freedom and civic involvement is being replaced by a technocratic nightmare in which government bureaucrats and their allies in the corporate sector rig the rules of society in order to protect the power and privilege of a select few politicians and businessmen; everybody's a target in the American surveillance state."
I urge all of you to contact your elected U.S. senators and representatives and call for the repeal of the PATRIOT Act, or at least for a major revision.
What we as a people need is a return to the revolutionary spirit and actions that, in 1776, produced the United States of America. If Americans accept this current situation, some will have earned the pejorative 'we the sheeple' and the creeping tyranny to which we all are now subjected.