There Should Be a Larger Uproar over the DEA’s Plan to Surveil Us — Wherever We Drive — Gestapo America Rolls on

© 2015 Peter Free

 

28 January 2015

 

 

Every time we go to sleep . . .

 

. . . some assemblage of well-meaning bureaucrats in Washington decides that they have to protect us from ourselves — and from our phantom enemies — by stomping Freedom to death.

 

News of the latest anti-Constitutional government program comes courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union, whom Republican pluto-fascists in our midst so love to hate:

 

 

The Drug Enforcement Administration has initiated a massive national license plate reader program with major civil liberties concerns but disclosed very few details, according to new DEA documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act.

 

The DEA is currently operating a National License Plate Recognition initiative that connects DEA license plate readers with those of other law enforcement agencies around the country.

 

The documents uncovered by our FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request provide additional details, but their usefulness is limited by the DEA’s decision to provide only documents that are undated or years old.

 

These records do, however, offer documentation that this program is a major DEA initiative that has the potential to track our movements around the country. With its jurisdiction and its finances, the federal government is uniquely positioned to create a centralized repository of all drivers’ movements across the country — and the DEA seems to be moving toward doing just that.

 

If license plate readers continue to proliferate without restriction and the DEA holds license plate reader data for extended periods of time, the agency will soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of our lives (particularly if combined with other data about individuals collected by the government, such as the DEA’s recently revealed bulk phone records program, or cell phone information gleaned from U.S. Marshals Service’s cell site simulator-equipped aircraft ).

 

Data-mining the information, an unproven law enforcement technique that the DEA has begun to use here, only exacerbates these concerns, potentially tagging people as criminals without due process.

 

© 2015 Bennett Stein and Jay Stanley, FOIA Documents Reveal Massive DEA Program to Record American’s Whereabouts With License Plate Readers, American Civil Liberties Union (26 January 2015) (extracts)

 

 

In addition to the threat of dumping due process

 

There is the quantitatively more expansive concern that a bunch of unaccountable enforcers in DC are going to know and remember our personal business even better than we do.

 

Given government’s predilection for snooping, messing, and baselessly arresting and prosecuting — this does not bode Freedom well.

 

 

Perhaps the most disturbing element of government’s increasingly totalitarian bent is its success in hiding its activities behind a wall of enforced secrecy

 

By making criminals of those who want to know what Big Brother is doing to us, government gets away with quickly dismantling the liberties and privacies most Americans say they treasure.

 

 

Common sense

 

As a knowledgeable ex-cop, I cannot credit the drug trade — which our laws actually encourage — with being a genuine national security issue. It is certainly not a societal problem significant enough to justify further ditching the Constitution that underlies the America that most of us profess to love.

 

Similarly, the illusion of the achievability of ironclad security against terrorism has fostered the toxic flowering of our national security bureaucracy’s anti-democratic (and no accountability) character.

 

 

The DEA effectively wants to follow everyone wherever they go?

 

And the NSA continues to listen in on whatever we do electronically in the name of unachievable ironclad security?

 

Does not the insanity of doing these things in a free society occur to anyone both powerfully influential and visibly associated with American government?

 

The unconstrained civil forfeitures associated with the ostensible drug war were early on indicative of the totalitarian evils that come from letting law enforcement do whatever it wants. And now our strategically senseless wars and this Administration’s drone murder program reek of the same morally and legally indefensible excesses.

 

 

A lesson from the not so distant past

 

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army was yesterday.

 

 

How do you think the Nazis knew where to grab the doomed innocents they scooped up?

 

How do you guess they secretly twisted democracy into systematic oppression and murder?

 

Where did they get the means that enabled the enslavement and death of millions upon millions of people?

 

 

The moral? — There is something about wielding power that quickly estranges politicians, cops, spies and militarists from common sense

 

I am astonished that, seven decades after my father came home from fighting totalitarians and the Gestapo’s all spying mentality, that we would be called to oppose similar authoritarian tendencies in our own country.

 

Privacy matters and freedom is life. To Americans, I should not even have to say this. WTF is wrong with us?