Atomictumor

A guy in Philadelphia was recently arrested for taking a picture of police action outside his house with a cellphone.

Despite there being any actual, real laws against this action.

Think this stuff happens in the big cities?  You should check in with Joe Powell, who had a lot of info about the police action in Morristown during a recent demonstration there, resulting in the apparently unwarrented tasering of a retired man with a flag.

All my life, I’ve heard people crying ‘1984!’ for various things like that, and I didn’t pay much attention.  When the Patriot Act was ramrodded through, and the .gov was talking about mailmen and meter readers snooping around your house getting info just in case you’re a turrist, I was disconcerted.

We now have news that border agents are legally able to fire up your laptop and snoop around on it.  We also have news of the DOJ ammending legislation originally intended to allow wiretapping on cellphones (bit of an oxymoron, huh?) to impose upon network traffic, by sending all traffic to the govenment to inspect for VoIP packets.

Sounds scary to me.  If I were much of a tin-foil hat person, I’d start wondering if this is how a regime would become oppressive.  I mean, if I were doing it, I’d start by making sure I stay in office.  This can be done by requiring states to upgrade voting to electronic machines.  We’d contract with a biased company and make sure that voting machines use proprietary software that is not up to public inspection.  Thats already happened, as we see in this coming local election.
After that we’d suppress objection.  Obviously, communications will have to be monitored, and candid photos of police in action would be taboo.  Get people used to being monitored, and make it a part of their lives, so that when revelations sneak through, like, say, massive unwarrented government phone tapping, it won’t make much of a splash.

After that… well, just wait and see!