Pentagon Expanding Domestic Surveillance
The Department of Defense is seeking greater powers to spy on U.S. citizens. In lieu of stopping future terrorist attacks the Pentagon wants to enhance domestic surveillance measures. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon highlights the danger of such proposals:
"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing."
The Director of The Center for National Security Studies, Kate Martin, said that the measure "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."
In the post-911 era American citizens have become the target for federal investigation and the only population whose civil liberties are being lost. All the while, the administration speaks much about the present war being one of "freedom." It is Orwellian to tout freedom while restricting liberties. Rushdoony states this well:
[T]he ideal social order and civil government was believed to be one which was dedicated to liberty, one which made basic to its purpose freedom of religion, speech, and press. But a society which makes freedom its primary goal will lose it, because it has made, not responsibility, but freedom from responsibility, its purpose. (Institutes of Biblical Law, p.581)
He concludes by saying, "The goal must be God's law-order, in which alone is true liberty." America's departure from Biblical law has led to the expansion of the totalitarian state. The modern state now claims total jurisdiction over its citizens:
For a state to claim total jurisdiction, as the modern state does, is to claim to be as god, to be the total governor of man and the world. Instead of limited law and limited jurisdiction, the modern antichristian state claims jurisdiction from cradle to grave, from womb to tomb, over welfare, education, worship, the family, business and farming, capital and labor, and all things else. The modern state is a Moloch, demanding Moloch worship: it claims total jurisdiction over man and hence requires total sacrifice. (Institutes, p.34)
The surveillance society has arrived. What was fictionalized in Orwell's 1984 now exists as a pale shadow in American society. As technology advances it is absorbed by the totalitarian state. President Eisenhower in his farewell speech of 1961 spoke of this phenomenon and its inherent dangers:
In this [technological] revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
As dangerous a marriage as is the federal government and the defense contractors so also is a union of state and technology. The means to extend federal policing policies are readily available and in the name of terrorist threat are being implemented upon the supposedly free American citizenry. Jacques Ellul, in his massive volume on technology (pub. 1964), forecasted the result of advanced technology in the hands of the state:
Finally, technique (i.e., technology) causes the state to become totalitarian, to absorb the citizens' life completely. We have noted this occurs as a result of the accumulation of techniques in the hands of the state. Techniques are mutually engendered and hence interconnected, forming a system that tightly encloses all our activities. When the state takes hold of a single thread of this network of techniques, little by little it draws to itself all the matter and the method, whether or not it consciously wills to do so. (The Technological Society, p.284)
Avoiding the dangers of the massive federal-military-technological union required an alert population according to President Eisenhower:
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Security and liberty are not prospering together. Only the state is prospering at this point. After repeated failures by defense, intelligence, and emergency management departments in the past five years the federal government has granted itself greater authority and an expanded budget. We, the taxpayers, are footing the bill for the new "security measures" while are civil liberties are being erroded by a growing police state. I always find it disturbing and humorous to watch decent American citizens subjected to humiliating searches by airport security and the needless postings of "colored" alerts by the DHS.
Eisenhower was wrong. A knowledgeable citizenry is an incomplete solution to tyranny. Freedom for freedom sake is not a Biblical goal.
"The goal must be God's law order, in which alone is true liberty." (Institutes, p.581)
