The government is weaponizing surveillance to silence its critics

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.

The government is weaponizing surveillance in order to silence its critics, muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

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For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal — surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc. — to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.

This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds, and using technology to do so.

Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 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 religious beliefs. If you attend a church or subscribe to religious beliefs that are at odds with the mainstream, politically correct views, for example, about abortion or homosexuality, you could be labeled a threat. Indeed, the government has a history of spying on houses of worship as part of its so-called effort to combat domestic terrorism.

Flagging you as a danger based on your face, phone and movements. If you’ve been anywhere near a political protest or gathered with people criticizing the government, you could be labeled a threat. 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. 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. Cell phones have also become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels.

Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. If you donate to political campaigns that criticize the government using a credit card, you could be labeled a threat. With every dollar we spend, 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.

Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. If you criticize the government on social media, you could be labeled a threat. 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.

Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. If you associate with individuals who criticize the government, you could be labeled a threat. 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.

Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. If you subscribe to political views at odds with the powers-that-be, you could be labeled a threat. Indeed, a Senate task force back 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.”

Nothing has changed since then.

More recently, the government has used the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.

All of us are in danger.

You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.

In other words, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.

Our job as citizens is to speak truth to power. The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books “The Erik Blair Diaries” and “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.