the surveillance state

John Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute shared this look at the state of our surveillance state. It is not exactly as either George Orwell or Aldous Huxley expected, but an ugly combination of both.

Go read it at the source – click the headline or trailer link to reach the full article. It has supporting links to put it all into perspective.

– Ted

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By John W. Whitehead

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It is a prison from which there will be no escape if the government gets it way.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

Unfortunately, we seem to be trapped in the Village with no hope of escape.
 
That we are prisoners—and, in fact, never stopped being prisoners—should come as no surprise to those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, and who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior.
 
So how do we break out?

For starters, wake up. Resist the urge to comply.
 
The struggle to remain “oneself in a society increasingly obsessed with conformity to mass consumerism,” writes Steven Paul Davies, means that superficiality and image trump truth and the individual

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