We The Targeted: How The Government Weaponizes Surveillance To Silence Its Critics

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to "Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" perceived threats to the government's power.

Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition, but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one's behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations.

One smart "Anti-riot" surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone's mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one's social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. 

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/we_the_targeted_how_the_government_weaponizes_surveillance_to_silence_its_critics