Life in the Electronic Concentration Camp: The Surveillance State Is Alive and WellBig Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [] and the like. William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice There is no cause for celebration. We have secured no major victories against tyranny. We have achieved no great feat in pushing back against government overreach. For all intents and purposes, the National Security Agency has supposedly ceased its bulk collection of metadata from Americans phone calls, but read the fine print: nothing is going to change. The USA Freedom Act, which claimed to put an end to the National Security Agencys controversial collection of metadata from Americans phone calls, was just a placebo pill intended to make us feel better and let the politicians take credit for reforming mass surveillance. In other words, it was a sham, a sleight-of-hand political gag pulled on a gullible public desperate to believe that we still live in a constitutional republic rather than a down-and-out, out-of-control, corporate-controlled, economically impoverished, corrupt, warring, militarized banana republic. You cannot restrain the NSA. The beast has outgrown its chains. You cannot reform the NSA. A government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing does not voluntarily alter its behavior. You cannot put an end to the NSAs technotyranny. Presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone over the course of the NSAs 60-year history, but none of them have managed to shut down the governments secret surveillance of Americans phone calls, emails, text messages, transactions, communications and activities. Indeed, the government has become an expert in finding ways to sidestep niggling, inconvenient laws aimed at ensuring accountability, bringing about government transparency and protecting citizen privacy. It has mastered the art of stealth maneuvers and end-runs around the Constitution. It knows all too well how to hide its nefarious, covert, clandestine activities behind the classified language of national security and terrorism. And when that doesnt suffice, it obfuscates, complicates, stymies or just plain bamboozles the public into remaining in the dark. Case in point: the so-called end of the NSAs metadata collection of Americans phone calls. This, of course, is no end at all. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will still be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. More than a year before politicians attempted to patch up our mortally wounded privacy rights with the legislative bandaid fix that is the USA Freedom Act, researchers at Harvard and Boston University documented secret loopholes that allow the government to bypass Fourth Amendment protections to conduct massive domestic surveillance on U.S. citizens. Its extraordinary rendition all over again, only this time its surveillance instead of torture being outsourced. In much the same way that the government moved its torture programs overseas in order to bypass legal prohibitions against doing so on American soil, it is doing the same thing for its surveillance programs. By shifting its data storage, collection and surveillance activities outside of the country, the government is able to bypass constitutional protections against unwarranted searches of Americans emails, documents, social networking data, and other cloud-stored data. Heck, the government doesnt even need to move all of its programs overseas. It just has to push the data over the border in order to [circumvent] constitutional and statutory safeguards seeking to protect the privacy of Americans. Credit for this particular brainchild goes to the Obama administration, which issued Executive Order 12333 authorizing the collection of Americans data from surveillance conducted on foreign soil. Using this rationale, the government was able to justify hacking into and collecting an estimated 180 million user records from Google and Yahoo data centers every month because the data travels over international fiber-optic cables. The NSA program, dubbed MUSCULAR, is carried out in concert with British intelligence. No wonder the NSA appeared so unfazed about being forced to shut down its much-publicized metadata program. It had already figured out a way to accomplish the same results (illegally spying on Americans communications) without being shackled by the legislative or judicial branches of the government. Mind you, this metadata collection now being carried out overseas is just a small piece of the surveillance pie. The government and its corporate partners have a veritable arsenal of surveillance programs that will continue to operate largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans phone calls, emails, text messages and the like, beyond the scrutiny of most of Congress and the taxpayers who are forced to fund its multi-billion dollar secret black ops budget. The surveillance state is alive and well and kicking privacy to shreds in America. Whether youre walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, will still be listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesnt even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We are now in a state of transition with the police state shifting into high-gear under the auspices of the surveillance state. Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn thenations police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more. Add in the fusion centers, city-wide surveillance networks, data clouds conveniently hosted overseas by Amazon and Microsoft, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, and biometric databases, and youve got the makings of a world in which privacy is reserved exclusively for government agencies. Thus, telephone surveillance by the NSA is the least of our worries. Even with restrictions on its ability to collect mass quantities of telephone metadata, the government and its various spy agencies, from the NSA to the FBI, can still employ an endless number of methods for carrying out warrantless surveillance on Americans, all of which are far more invasive than the bulk collection program. As I point out in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, just about every branch of the governmentfrom the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in betweennow has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spiesthe police, public health officials, transportation, etc.and make it accessible for all those in power. And of course that doesnt even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. Indeed, Facebook, Amazon and Google are among the governments closest competitors when it comes to carrying out surveillance on Americans, monitoring the content of your emails, tracking your purchases and exploiting your social media posts. Few consumers understand what data are being shared, with whom, or how the information is being used, reports the Los Angeles Times. Most Americans emit a stream of personal digital exhaust what they search for, what they buy, who they communicate with, where they are that is captured and exploited in a largely unregulated fashion. Its not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked. Were being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometricsour faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gaitruns them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique identifiers, and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses. All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes refers to them as (data) pipelines to our intimate bodily processes)the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints and iris scansare setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. For instance, imagine what the NSA could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance, the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals. There is already discussion about placing voice sensors in public spaces, and [Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation] said that multiple sensors could be triangulated to identify individuals and specify their location within very small areas. Suddenly the NSAs telephone metadata program seems like childs play compared to whats coming down the pike. That, of course, is the point. The NSA is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under surveillance and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government. In other words, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its domestic surveillance efforts. At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to we the people. Now there are still those who insist that they have nothing to hide from the surveillance state and nothing to fear from the police state because they have done nothing wrong. To those sanctimonious few, secure in their delusions, let this be a warning: the danger posed by the American police state applies equally to all of uslawbreaker and law abider alike, black and white, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, blue collar and white collar, and any other distinction youd care to trot out. In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, there is no safe place and no watertight alibi. We are all guilty of some transgression or other, and eventually, we will all be made to suffer the same consequences in the electronic concentration camp that surrounds us. Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute, where this article first appeared. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. The moment you cower down in front of the Feds, they win. If you are smart, you will seek out your local militia, buy all the people in your family guns and ammunition and lessons if you do not know how to use them and then standby to standby. It is better to die on your feet then live on your knees. Take out as many as you can. How does one seek and find their local militia? Is there and do you by any good chance have access to a nationwide contact list of them? I really see no point to these discussion threads. The Government has no laws. They have power and they use it any way they want. There should have been a national Constitution-burning event years ago. Yet they have unleashed a brutal Rule Of Law which merits armed resistance i.e., killing the perpetrators of life-destroying hypocrisies. So whos gonna come-a-knockin on my door after this maybe a retired drone operator-turned-cop, with several hundred innocent child-kills under his belt? Yeah, buddy. They aint got the gnodes. More likely one of their extra-judicial assets so abundant here in Mohave County, Arizona. Theyll come knocking with a BS story designed if possible to worm into your life while you try to figure it out. But if they knew how its gonna turn out, they wouldnt want in now. I am so totally beyond angry, tired, and weary of the USA surface and shadow governments in partnership with rich big corporate America daily violating my entire life, all civil rights freedoms, privacy, those of all my family and friends too for 8 long miserable years now of non-stop ongoing illegal targeting, harassment, and intimidation of every kind. Does anyone out there know of any independent underground organizations of American citizens well helping themselves and other suffering Americans to effectively fight against all of this or to effectively and affordably entirely drop off-grid and off-radar from debilitating, illegal and abusive government monitoring? THE SOUL NEVER FORGETS. Upon the Soul, though not yet brought to Consciousness, is impressed every thought, desire and act. The Soul continues to retain these impressions unless they are removed by thoughts, acts and deeds of what we term goodness. These impressions on the mind vanish from sight, i.e., are mostly forgotten, BUT EVIL DEEDS CONTINUE FOR EVER AS A DEBT, UNLESS REMOVED NOT BY MERE BELIEF The meaning of Karma is in the intention. The intention behind action is what matters. Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do. They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, who have renounced every selfish desire and sense-craving tormenting the heart. 