PETAs Activist Drones Enabling The Police State?John Galt Enter the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I actually have had personal experience with this organization and I have found it to be exemplary of all major bureaucratic organizations with the added evil of purveying an extremist ideology that is the very same as all top-down control freak nannyisms. I offer this disclaimer only because it is central to the following story. PETA is the de facto tip of the spear in the war for animal rights and animal activism. Their stunts and antics are quite legendary and, I believe, have done more to push away fence straddlers than to convince them. Therefore, I am aggravated as an activist to see them framed as such. And now they have employed drones to force their agenda. Under the very same banner of totalitarian government that claims if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear or, more succinctly: If you see something, say something; PETA drones have taken to the sky with their Orwellian fleet called Air Angels. I mean, you dont hate angels, do you? Yes, I do hate angels. At least when they are wolves in sheeps clothing. Or hawks in doves clothing, as it were. Listen to the rationale for surveillance asserted by PETAs director of animal law, Jared Goodman: Right: If You See Something, Say Something. Even if it comes from a drone. But that is, of course, what the government has claimed all along that it is doing. All of the NSA surveillance; all the drones all to simply catalog illegal activity anywhere it occurs, at any time. Thats why the U.S. Constitution and the documents and rules upon which it was based recognize fundamental rights and due process: to protect the individual from the State, as well as other individuals, no matter their stated benevolent intentions. Following that reasoning, Illinois is not buying the drones are flying angels theory. The program has been made illegal. And a salute to Illinois not for protecting animal thrill-killers, but for understanding that only in a nation of principles can we take the longer road of debate, education, and hopefully consensual reform. The short track to tyranny is the paved path upon which all good intentions might lead us in our age of high-tech surveillance and control. I fully support using technology for good, but is this the best way? What do you think? Recently from John Galt: 