Government Spying on Americans -- Doesn't Any One Care?

[Octafish]

Who gives a damn?

Doesn't Any One Care?

Government Spying on Americans

By SHELDON RICHMAN
CounterPunch
Weekend Edition
January 14, 2011

Most Americans seem detached from the U.S. government's military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. U.S. forces not only engage in wanton killing and harsh treatment of prisoners, but also surveillance and other intelligence activities that might appall the American people if they were used at home.

Well, guess what: "Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America7" writes the Washington Post in its continuing series, "Top Secret America."

The Post reports:

"Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

"The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

"The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States."

Sad to say, this article has gotten little attention. Is it a matter of so little importance? Governments at all levels are united in a campaign to spy on Americans, gathering, analyzing, and storing data without probable cause and hardly anyone seems to care.

Have Americans become so docile that they roll over for anything rationalized as necessary in the "war on terror"? If so, they have abandoned one of greatest virtues of early generations: suspicion of power. They might as well stop talking about liberty and individualism because it just a lot of empty words now.

CONTINUED...

http://counterpunch.org/richman01142011.html

Sen. Frank Church warned what would happen if the NSA turned its spy satellites and eavesdropping technologies on the American people.

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Church added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA “could enable to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

So, do you give a damn? If you believe in Democracy, you should.