What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.
Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.
Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.
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Basically, as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has warned, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.
What most Americans don’t get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that’s how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.
These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.
The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.
On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
Talk about a system rife for abuse.
Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.
Don’t believe it.
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.
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This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches for Americans’ private communications each year.
No one is spared.
Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.
Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.
The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply “incidental,” as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.
As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies “could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database — the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT — that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market.”
Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”
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What this is really all about, however, is control.
What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.
When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions— warrantlessly and without probable cause — for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.
* Original Article:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/24/section-702-of-fisa-makes-mockery-of-constitution/?utm_source=smartnews.com&utm_medium=smartnews&utm_campaign=smartnews%20
