Mark America

Guess Who Is Watching

As if we didn’t know that this was already under way, it’s being reported that the Department of Homeland Security has moved to monitor media, particularly those who use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”  Congratulations! This blog is being monitored. The monitoring will be under the auspices of the Nation Operations Center’s Media Monitoring Initiative, defined last November at DHS. For those who aren’t worried, you should consider that it will collect personal identifiable information, permitting DHS to directly or indirectly learn about individuals.  This is another example of government gone wild, and while I can understand the security imperatives with which that agency must contend, I also know that this will wind up being used as a tool of political oppression.

Of course, we learned last month that DHS would be monitoring Twitter and Facebook for words like “collapse,” “drill,” “recovery,” “trojan,” and “illegal immigrant,”  among others, so to now learn that “Big Sis” will be watching those in the blogosphere and social media is really not a surprise.  The more ridiculous aspect of all of this is how it will be used, and one can only imagine what will happen to a hypothetical blogger who might write something like this:

“DHS is conducting a drill to practice for the collapse of the Euro, and while they’re using the pretense that we’re in an economic recovery, they’re using an outbreak of crime by illegal immigrants to bolster security measures by DHS, which is serving as the Trojan horse for stricter measures against the people.”

A line like that would probably set off every warning bell in Washington DC, and the fact that it appeared on a blog or in social media that is used to keep readers up to date with real-time information would make it especially noteworthy to security monitors at DHS.  Apparently, this will be the new wave of the future, in which government monitors everything for our safety and security.  What this means for Americans is that we’re lurching ever more rapidly toward some form of police state in which nobody is free from government snooping under any circumstances.