Down With Big Brother: Warrantless Surveillance Makes A Mockery Of The Constitution

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people, Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government's spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. The government's "Technotyranny" surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it's hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.

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.

First, the government seeks out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis-in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism-and then they use those powers against the American people.

Ask the government why it's carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you'll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you've done anything wrong, it's just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence. 

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