While I appreciate your careful response, it is unrealistic to suggest that this is a "small step." This step will revolutionize surveillance capabilities in our police departments across this nation and open up an entire new industry that seriously threatens our security and privacy. We are talking about a fundamental change in the way police departments operate in this country, that has the potential to penetrate every area of our lives.
Before we get too sanguine about our Fourth Amendment rights, we should stop and consider the sustained assault they have experienced over the past twelve years, and continue to experience. The pace of these assaults has only accelerated, even under a Democratic administration, because the financial interests driving these changes are deeply rooted in both political parties now. '
It was the Obama administration that fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to surveil us, sans warrant, with GPS. Corporatists in both parties have validated and approved the use of Rapiscans that do not enhance our security but subject thousand of Americans every day to humiliating and unnecessary searches that are profiting the makers of these machines. And corporate interests that stand to profit have been behind the many other pieces of authoritarian legislation we have found ourselves fighting against over the past several years. While we rallied against SOPA and PIPA, our President quietly signed ACTA and claimed national security status for the decision in order to keep it out of the media. The administration is also quietly moving ahead with an Internet ID plan that will make someone rich, and DHS is seeking to implement 24/7 surveillance camera systems that will cover large swaths of New York City, for starters.
And now they want to bring the drones they developed for military surveillance and combat to our skies, and they want to create an entire new industry equipping our police forces with tools to surveil and control beyond anything we could have imagined thirty years ago. We are already pouring money into militarizing our police departments. Our schools, our libraries, our social safety nets are being starved in order to pour money into these schemes that oppress us and profit the makers. Do we really need to do this? Do we really want to do this?
morningfog, even if you support these measures, and even if you consider them "small steps," I hope you will agree that our efforts now in this debate should not be focused on reassuring the public about "small steps" and downplaying the importance of what is happening, but rather on speaking out loudly to protect our civil liberties. We have learned the hard way over the past twelve years that "small steps" erode freedom, particularly when they come one after another after another, like to a frog in a pot of slowly heating water. We have learned the hard way that our freedoms require constant vigilance and aggressive pushback in order to be maintained. When it is a choice between our liberties and profit, the corporate interests who infest our government will choose profit every time.
The ACLU has just issued a report recommending steps to protect our privacy from aerial drones in our skies.
http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/report-protecting-privacy-aerial-surveillance-recommendations-government-use
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