The government is already setting up informant networks that may enforce government tyranny. It all starts with the best of intentions but that is not the way it ends up. Soon your nation has become like Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR. Where a small percent of informers are paid to keep watch on everyone else. Then the social engineers pass hate speech laws and the informers report people who espouse extremist beliefs like the second coming of Jesus Christ. They will become subversives, and all who quote certain parts of the Bible will become hate speech criminals. It is happening in China and North Korea. Think it can’t happen here? Keep letting things go the way they are going now and you find out differently.
Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.
According to a Denver Post report, “It’s a tactic intended to feed better data into terrorism early-warning systems and uncover intelligence that could help fight anti-U.S. forces. But the vague nature of the TLOs’ mission, and their focus on reporting both legal and illegal activity, has generated objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
“Suspicious activity” is broadly defined in TLO training as behavior that could lead to terrorism: taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist beliefs or conversing in code, according to a draft Department of Justice/Major Cities Chiefs Association document.”
“We don’t snoop into private citizens’ lives. We aren’t living in a communist state,” claims Lt. Tony Lopez, commander of Denver’s intelligence unit – but the program bears close parallels to the East German Stasi system, which at its height employed one informant for every seven citizens.
Since authorities now define mundane activities like buying baby formula, beer, wearing Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents like a drivers license and traveling with women or children or mentioning the U.S. constitution as the behavior of potential terrorists, the bounty for the American Stasi to turn in political dissidents is sure to be too tempting to resist.
As any budding dictator will tell you, the creation of an informant society where individuals self-regulate their behavior in fear of being turned in by a citizen spy is one of the key stepping stones to tyranny. To have the media celebrate the fact that people are reporting on their neighbors and grandchildren puts the icing on the cake.
