Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism

[Octafish]

7. Reason for wholesale surveillance is so government can arrest a certain category.

Writing about the Third Reich, Hannah Arendt pegged our situation today.

Via Chris Hedges:

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

BTW: One company's technology helped enable both regimes, IBM.